Posted on 08/17/2016 11:53:04 AM PDT by Gamecock
AIKEN COUNTY, SC The reputation of Murphy Village’s residents reaches far beyond the Palmetto State.
The North Augusta community, just past Interstate 20 in Aiken County, is home to one of the largest communities of Irish Travelers in the nation. According to the 2010 Census, about 1,400 Travelers live in Murphy Village. National counts of Travelers range between 10,000 and 40,000.
Nationwide, the community’s residents have been associated with scams involving shoddy repair work. Most recently, Union County Sheriff David Taylor published an article in the local newspaper warning residents to be alert for Irish Travelers leaving their business cards around town.
On Tuesday, a federal grand jury returned an indictment of 45 counts against 22 people, most of them Travelers living in Murphy Village. The indictment alleges the group committed different kinds of fraud and money laundering schemes, among other charges.
Similar allegations have been raised against Travelers in the past. But for the most part, they are praised within their community in Aiken County. According to published reports, it’s common practice for travelers to not target residents in their own neighborhood.
Locals say most Travelers are honest, hard-working people whose reputations have been tainted by the actions of a few. Because they live together and keep to themselves, suspicion of them is rampant. They own lavish homes and mansions in Murphy Village that show few signs of life. The windows of most homes are covered from top to bottom with blinders or are tinted.
They also speak a secret and protective dialect called “Cant” that meshes English and Gaelic when they feel uncomfortable around outsiders. Travelers believe their reclusiveness has allowed them to keep their traditional lifestyle, according to news reports.
Irish have moved to America since before the country’s founding. But they emigrated to the United States in large numbers in the 1840s, after potato crop failures left them with a period of mass starvation. Most stayed in large Northeastern cities. But a small group, the Travelers, broke off and moved to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Most of the men work on the road traveling to different states during favorable weather to work in construction-related jobs, such as repairing roofs, resurfacing driveways and painting barns.
Travelers often take their families with them, pulling children from school around the eighth grade. Remaining in school can endanger their lifestyle if teens start to date outside of the community, according to reports. A handful of students have chosen to remain in school but are often ostracized from their families.
The best glimpse outsiders had into South Carolina’s Murphy Village was in 2012, when an episode of TLC’s “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” chronicled a North Augusta couple’s wedding preparations.
The episode centered on Tamara and Bill McKown, a couple who married in December 2011. What was special about the episode was that Tamara McKown was a non-Traveler from Tennessee, according to the Augusta Chronicle.
Before that, Irish Travelers gained the nation’s attention when one of their own, Madelyne Toogood, was caught on camera beating her 4-year-old daughter at an Indiana shopping center. Toogood was identified as being part of a Texas-based branch of the clan.
They also received unwanted attention after they were featured in an award-winning investigation by NBC’s “Dateline” in the mid-1990s that focused on how children as young as 10 were being forced to wed.
Following the news investigation, then-S.C. Attorney General Charlie Condon created a task force that swept through Murphy Village, arresting Travelers on charges similar to those filed Tuesday.
Condon also called on the Legislature to pass a law setting a minimum age for marriage. In 1997, the minimum age was set at 14 for girls and in 2000 it was updated to 16.
I guess I was you young and stupid at the time, but when it came time to selling doughnuts for local school activities, Murphy Village was the first and only place I’d go. Drive up, park centrally, and they’d line up to buy them. I’d usually be in and out of there in 20-30 minutes and my job would be complete.
Never had any troubles.
There was a crew that screwed up the front steps of pretty much every house on my block. They would come up and offer a great price to replace brick steps. I had just removed my own brick steps a few months before, and I knew what a pain it was to remove the bricks and masonry. I removed everything, including the foundation, because I was replacing with wooden steps, which my wife prefers... Yeah, I know...
This crew came in, and instead of removing the old steps, or at least the top course, they just went over them with new brick and faux concrete slates and raised the landing to just below the door opening. If they had to pitch the landing into the house to make it happen, they did so. If the bottom step wound up three inches too tall, they would just pile up dirt in front of it to hide it. Furthermore, they ran the slate landing right up to the ledger board under the door, and this mortar-to-wood connection wound up rotting out on pretty much every single house.
It was crap work. They did the house two down from me and pitched me on the same job. I went to look at the completed house, and saw the puddle against the ledger board, and said no thank you. I tried to warn my neighbors, but I was new in the neighborhood and they figured I didn’t know what I was talking about.
They were in the neighborhood for a couple of months and they just drove away.
;-)
A dialect is a cant, cant is not a dialect.
A cant is a dialect, vernacular, or “lingo”. “Cant” is not a particular dialect.
They aren’t ‘Irish Travelers’ they are grifters and thieves.....pure and simple
I remember living in St Petersburg FL in the 60s when the news paper had big headlines exhorting all to beware! the Terrible Williamsons were sweeping into town. Don’t let anyone you don’t know resurface your driveway or fix your roof! etc. I remember my neighbhood being inundated with these fix-it people going door to door and sometimes while the householder was answering the front door someone else was going in the back door.
The Irish Tinkers are NOT Gysies. There is not much difference in their habits, though.
Figured I’d see you here.
Black paint or used motor oil.
If they call it Cant then Cant is, indeed, the name for that mode of speech.
Qunn Martin’s “The Year Of The Locusts” episode of The Streets Of San Francisco.
LOL!! I was just looking around for my old “travelers” ping list, but it must be on my old broken computer...
They speak in a cant. That cant has various names depending on the group.
Look it up.
The Terrible Williamsons called it Cant. I know what cant is and argot and slang and lingo and all that. When a group puts a capital letter on it then it becomes a name that does not necessarily closely reflect the meaning of the uncapitalized word.
Do you recall the last names which most of them share. There is one in particular but I can’t remember it. Williamson is probably one of them but not the most common.
The Celts invaded the British Isles and were contested by somebody. I doubt its was elves, fairies and leprechauns!
I had some of them try to pull that speaker scam on me years ago. I’d like to think I was too smart, but the reality was that my car was too small to stow the speaker boxes and I was on my way to work.
They may call it “The Cant” yet “The Cant” of American Irish and Scottish tinkers is a cant mutually unintelligible with each other. There are multiple dialects calling themselves “The Cant”.
I am not sure who the earliest inhabitants were but there were Celtic tribes around the time of Christ. Ireland was invaded by a tribe called “Scots” who then settled the islands and eventually went to Scotland where they again fought with native Celts.
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