The Coad story

At 12 years old in 1846, Martin Hughes left County Mayo and came to America with his parents, John and Mary Welch Hughes, and one brother and four half-sisters. Sadly, the unnamed brother got lost in the shuffle of immigrants arriving in New York. Decades later, the Daily NonPareil newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa, reported that Martin, over his lifetime, "spent much money, time and effort trying, unsuccessfully, to find his lost brother."

Martin married Mary Wickham, an immigrant from Kiltubred in County Leitrim. Mary had come to America with her mother, Cecelia Pryor Wickham, and one sibling in 1854, and to Council Bluffs in 1857. Mary's father, Patrick, and three more siblings (of the 10 Wickham siblings born in Ireland, only seven lived to adulthood) followed the family to Council Bluffs in 1858.

Mary's father was an accomplished bricklayer and stonemason. Together with his son-in-law, Martin, they hung out a contractor's shingle, Hughes & Wickham. They became successful brick-makers and builders in Council Bluffs, then a booming little city across the river from Omaha, Nebraska. The Hughes and Wickham families together kiln-fired more than a million quality bricks and built churches, banks, and commercial buildings throughout the region, including the original abbey at St. Benedict's (now Benedictine) College in Atchison, KS.

Noted the NonPareil in a retrospective published on St. Patrick's Day, 2013: "No single family (group) contributed more to the building of Council Bluffs."