Conway Mill Trust

On July 17, 1798, Henry Joy McCracken was executed in Belfast as a leader in the Nationalist movement.

Friar’s Bush cemetery in Belfast, now closed, has a grisly history.  During the plague in 1832 thousands of bodies were burnt and thrown into a pit.  This pit was also the resting place of victims of the Great Hunger.  Stories are told of servant girls, afraid of scandal, threw their babies, dead and alive, over the wall at night.  It gets its name from Penal times when a friar was hung from the tree under which he was saying Mass.

James McHenry was born in Ballymena, Co Antrim. He came to America as a young man and studied medicine.  He joined the army at the outbreak of the American Revolution as a surgeon.  He was captured and imprisoned by the British. McHenry tried in vain to improve the medical conditions in prisons.  After his release, he turned to politics and served as a candidate to the Constitutional Convention and helped write the Constitution.  He was the signer of the Constitution from Maryland.  After the war, he served as Secretary of War under both Pres. Washington and Adams.  Fort McHenry in Baltimore is named after him and is where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write “The Star Spangled Banner” during the War of 1812.