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Mary E. Egan (1857–1909)▼1 and her two daughters used her maiden
name after her divorce from Thomas Duffy (1849–1924). The daughters were Katherine Duffy
(1882–1977) and Francis Duffy (1885–1907). In Amboy the women lived in a home that had belonged to
Mary’s father, an Irish immigrant named Michael H. Egan (182–1903), dead since April that year.▼2 A
brick layer, Michael had been sent to Amboy in the early 1850s by the
Illinois Central
Railway to oversee masonry
work during construction of IC’s roundhouse and passenger station.▼3 He
and his wife, the former Ellen Morrissey, had stayed on and Michael become a prominent
figure in the Amboy community, serving as mayor multiple times and in various other
municipal capacities.
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His children became the shopkeepers of Amboy’s early history,
including John Egan, later president of the Georgia Central Railway. Mary and John were
two of Michael’s thirteen children, of which six passed prior to 1900.
In the years after the fire
In 1905 Katy Duffy married attorney Henry Charles Kenline (1875–1962). They raised six
children in Dubuque, Iowa, including a daughter named after Katy’s mother Mary.
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Discrepancies and addendum
1 Some sources report Mary’s birth year as 1860.
2. Michael Egan died after a
three-week illness as searches continued in the Rocky Mountains of Montana for the body of his son, Benjamin F. Egan, who had disappeared during a winter hunting trip with friends. The body was not found until the snow thawed in June. Benjamin had been a regional superintendent on the Great Northern Railroad.
3. Two men who played a role in Michael Egan relocating from Springfield, Massachusetts to Amboy,
and in his working for the Illinois Central Railroad, would in another decade figure in the Civil War.
John B. Wyman
was also from Springfield and was employed by IC. He became a colonel in the war and
died in the battle of Chickasaw Bayou. IC’s chief engineer, George B. McClellan, made
Amboy his headquarters as the railway pushed northward; he became General of the Army of
the Potomac. The Illinois Central depot was destroyed by fire in 1875 and rebuilt,
probably not by Michael who by then had become a purchasing agent for Illinois Central.
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