The popular song “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” was written in 1876 and immortalized by singers Count John McCormack and Josef Locke. It is a song of longing for the land from which the writer and his lady have come. the reference to “Across the Wide and Wild Ocean” and “Where the fields are fresh and green” Both have generally been regarded as the Old Country, the beloved original home of so many Irish immigrants to the United States of America.
But this is not necessarily the case.
The lyrics certainly point to Ireland as the “home” of the song, but not the composer’s background. Thomas P Westendorf, was born in Virginia. Certainly many people of Irish descent were born on the East Coast of the US, but they would not carry the Westendorf name, which points to a more Germanic ancestry.
Also, the song was not written in Virginia, but in Plainfield, Ill. to his wife, whose name wasn’t even Kathleen, but Jennie, while she was visiting their hometown of Ogdensburg, New York. So perhaps the “home” being referred to was not the Emerald Isle, but the equally green fields of upstate New York. And what to say about the “wide and wild ocean.” A bit harder to explain, but probably referring to the grasslands, which at the time were still as dangerous and forbidding as any ocean.
By this time, the new “Oregon Trail” to the west coast was very well established. In the early days, the pioneers found the standard wagon, based on the stout Conestoga design favored by the other pioneers, to be too large and heavy when crossing the Rocky Mountains, killing even the strongest oxen teams long before they the trip was completed. So the Studebaker brothers developed a lighter version and nicknamed it “Prairie Schooners”.
Thus, by 1876, the concept of schooners (and thus the prairie akin to a vast ocean) was firmly in the national lexicon, so it would be natural for Westendorf to incorporate references to a wide and wild ocean still largely untamed in his song, not wanting to say the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side of which stretched a country he hardly knew about.
