Tulare County Biographies

PETER T. BRADY

Submitted by Sally Kaleta, January, 2007

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm

	The subject of this sketch is a native son of the Emerald 
Isle. He was born in County Meath, Ireland, March 17, 1839, son of Bryan Brady, 
a blacksmith by trade. Peter T. learned the same trade with an older brother, 
and in 1868, emigrated to America. After a brief sojourn in Connecticut, he came 
direct to California and to Kern County. Like the most of new-comers to this 
State at that time, Mr. Brady had his experience in the mines. However, he only 
mined about a month; located in Havilah, where he conducted a blacksmith shop 
five years. During the gold excitement at Kernville he again sought the mines, 
and when mining interests declined there he located on a ranch on South Fork of 
Kern River, where he has 160 acres of farming land. Mr. Brady married Miss Mary 
E. Irving, daughter of Robert Irving, deceased. She is a native of San Francisco 
and of American parentage. Their union has been blessed with five children: 
Bernard Philip, Robert James, Peter John, Patrick Eugene, and Katie Susan. Mr. 
Brady is a man of business enterprise and industry. Besides developing his 
ranch, he conducts Mr. Scodie's well-equipped blacksmith shop at Scodie, besides 
his own, during the summer months. When the biographer styled Mr. Brady a 
"native son of the Emerald Isle," the phrase called up in the memory of the 
latter the following reflections: "The great feature of our destiny as traced in 
our history is that it was the will of God and our fate that a large portion of 
our people be constantly either driven from the Irish shore or obliged by the 
course of circumstances or apparently of their own free will to leave. The 
'Irish Exile' is not a being of yesterday or of last year. We turn over these 
honored pages of history until we come to the very brightest pages of the 
national records, and still we find emblazoned upon the annals of every nation 
of the earth the grand and the most honored names of the 'Exile of Erin.' And I, 
O mother, far away from thy green bosom, hail thee from afar as the prophet of 
old beholding the fair plains of the promised land, and proclaim this day that 
there is no land so fair; no spot of earth to be compared to thee; no nation 
rising out of the waves so beautiful as thou art; and that neither the sun nor 
the moon nor the stars of heaven shine down upon anything so lovely as thee, O 
Erin."
 
Source: "The Memorial and Biographical History of the Counties of Fresno, Tulare 
and Kern, California," Lewis Publ. Co., 1892, pp. 350-351.