Hanceville held its first Irish Heritage Celebration on Saturday. The city hopes to make it an annual event. / W.C. Mann
HANCEVILLE – On Saturday, the city of Hanceville observed the St. Patrick’s Day holiday with a downtown celebration of its own. The shopping district was decked out in shamrocks and other things green, and a fiddler played while children searched for lost leprechaun gold (They were just painted rocks, but don’t tell them!) hidden in little nooks and crannies all over downtown. After an hour of searching, the kids got together for a gold count and the awarding of prizes to the most successful prospectors.
Event coordinator Coleen Vansant read a proclamation from Mayor Kenneth Nail, who was out of town and could not attend:
As early as the 1820s, settlers from Georgia and Virginia came to the area of what we now know as the city of Hanceville. Many of those settlers were born in Ireland or were of Irish ancestry. They were hard working and industrious, and they were determined to carve out a new life in what was still the wilds of north Alabama.
A.S. Martin, an immigrant from Ireland, was the first settler to what became a railroad whistle stop called Gilmer Station. Shortly after came P.H. Kinney, also of Irish ancestry, who arrived in the area and opened a post office in his store in 1872, thus becoming the first postmaster. When the bustling community attempted to incorporate in 1879, the name Gilmer was already taken by a town in Alabama. Mr. Kinney named the town Hanceville, in honor of his father, Hanceford or “Hance” Kinney.
Because of their strength and sacrifice to help build what we know and enjoy as Hanceville today, therefore I, Kenneth Nail, mayor of the city of Hanceville, hereby proclaim today, Saturday, March 17, 2018 as “Irish Heritage Day” in the city of Hanceville.
Vansant said, “We started out small this year, for the first time . . . Hanceville was founded 50 years before Cullman, or the settlers were here. Fifty years before Col. Cullmann even came to Cullman, the Irish were here, settling. So we just wanted to honor our Irish heritage and our Irish founders.”
According to Vansant, the event was a small-scale model for larger celebrations in the future.
“This is just a trial run,” she said. “We put it together rather quickly in the past couple of weeks. It’s why we didn’t get more activities. But we just wanted to create the awareness, and we’re really wanting to come out next year and do some good things to celebrate Hanceville’s Irish heritage.”
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