Type: Article
Severens, Kenneth ‘Emigration and Provincialism: Samuel Cardys Architectual Career in the Atlantic World’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 5 (1990), pp 21-36.
In 1752, Dublin master builder and carpenter Samuel Cardy emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. Though involved in some successful buildings in Dublin, Cardys departure for America was the result of his being found to have overcharged for work done on the Barracks at Navan and then to have offered a bribe to the official inspecting his work. Once he got to America, however, Cardy used his knowledge of Irish architecture well and based several buildings on those he had known in Ireland. Cardys career on both sides of the ocean provides persuasive architectural evidence for an interrelated Atlantic world, as well as a specific instance of Irish-American emigration. Severens notes that Cardys exile was more characteristic of that of the catholics of the following century than of eighteenth-century protestants, and comments on Cardys assimilation into the American community of English, Scottish, Huguenot, and protestant Irish residents. Severens concludes that: In bringing to South Carolina the latest Dublin architectural style, Cardy furthered the cause of North American Anglicisation. Included are nine plates of buildings associated with Cardy.