Palatine

German refugees settled here in 1709. Their descendants founded Methodism in America.

In 1709 the British government shipped roughly 3,000 Protestant refugees from the Rhine Palatinate — the German region that gives the village its name — to Ireland as a buffer against Catholic land reclamation. Several hundred were settled north of Carlow town on confiscated lands. They arrived speaking German, practising Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism, and carrying family names that were entirely foreign to the county around them: Switzer, Sparling, Manders, Embury, Heck. The village they settled is still called Palatine. The road north, the R448, still runs through it. Most cars do not stop.

The Palatine families resisted assimilation longer than anyone expected. For decades they married within the community, maintained their surnames, kept their own religious traditions. Methodism arrived among them in the 1740s when John Wesley's preachers moved through Leinster, and it took — partly because the Palatines were already Protestant and partly because they were already a community apart. Philip Embury and Barbara Heck, both children of Palatine families settled in Ballingrane, Co. Limerick, grew up in that tradition. They had roots in the same 1709 wave.

In 1760, Philip Embury and Barbara Heck emigrated to New York. They found the city without a Methodist congregation. Barbara Heck — the story goes — walked into a card game being played by neighbours, swept the cards into the fire, and told Embury he had better start preaching or she would find someone who would. He did. He built a small chapel on John Street in Manhattan in 1768, the first Methodist chapel in America. Both Embury and Heck are remembered as founders of American Methodism. Both trace their line to the Palatine settlers, the German refugees who came to Carlow and Limerick over 300 years ago and never entirely went home.