The history of Letterfrack
The Ellises, the mission, the industrial school, Marconi, Butler's church, the college. 7 moments, in order.
- 1849
The Ellises
James and Mary Ellis, Quakers from Bradford, took nearly a thousand acres of rough land to farm and plant with woodland, and built a schoolhouse, tradesmen's houses, a shop, a dispensary and a temperance hotel.
- 1857
The Irish Church Mission
John Hall bought the property and put it to the mission's work of converting Catholics; twenty-five years brought little success.
- 1882 to 1887
The industrial school
Archbishop John McEvilly of Tuam bought the thousand acres for 3,000 pounds under a false name, so that Hall thought the buyer a Protestant, and in 1887 St Joseph's Industrial School opened. Under the Christian Brothers it became notorious for beatings, neglect and the abuse of the boys in its care, and closed in 1974.
- 1911 to 1917
Marconi
Marconi chose the school as the receiving station for his duplex transatlantic service: eastbound messages came from Nova Scotia to Letterfrack from April 1911 while Clifden sent westbound. His engineers worked out duplex operation here with a balanced carborundum detector and a wire dropped from an aerial slung between Diamond Hill and Mweelin. The station moved to Currywongaun and closed in April 1917.
- 1924 to 1926
St Joseph's church
Rudolf Maximilian Butler's Romanesque Revival church, a single four-bay nave with two small side chapels, was dedicated by Archbishop Gilmartin on 12 June 1926.
- 1984
West Coast United
The football club was founded; by 2021 it had about 250 members and a sand-based pitch, a floodlit all-weather pitch and a clubhouse.
- 1987
The furniture college
Connemara West began furniture courses that became the Furniture College, now a campus of the Atlantic Technological University.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Letterfrack", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.