CASTLETOWN, OMAGH, COUNTY TYRONE BT78 5QY, NORTHERN IRELAND, TEL +44 (0)28 8224 3292
It was in this cottage that Thomas Mellon was born in February 1813. The cottage was built by his father Andrew and his brother 'Archy' 'chiefly by the labour of their own hands', shortly before Thomas was born. Thomas was to spend the first five years of his life in this cottage before he and his family emigrated to America.
Mellon Homestead
Many years later, when he had risen to wealth and power, he remembered with great affection the cottage where he was born: 'What has ever seemed strange to me is the fact that its picture has always remained fresh in my mind, with all its details of locations and scenery.' Thomas Mellon returned on a visit to his boyhood home some sixty-four years after he had left it and remarked: '... there was not the slightest correction to be made in my mental map. It was all there in every particular, as I had seen it when a child and still remembered it.'
It was through the considerable generosity of Thomas Mellon's descendants, the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that the ancestral cottage was restored and opened to the public in 1968. When the Folk Park opened in 1976 as part of the American bicentennial celebrations, the Mellon Homestead became its centrepiece. The cottage and outbuildings are typical of the small farmsteads which so many Irish people left behind as they sought a new life in America.
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