Ilove maps and place names, including Oldcastle, the Ontario hamlet where I grew up. I was happy years ago to find, via Google, four other places by that name: two in Wales, one in England and one in Ireland.
Frank Gallagher has taken that kind of search far beyond Google.
As curator of the Joan Winchell collection of Oscar Wilde literature in Las Vegas, he visited Antipodean Books on Garrison’s Landing in September looking for Wildean materials.
Gallagher, 71, grew up in another Garrison, a village in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, population 411. It has four landmarks: a church, a school, a pharmacy and a Scott’s Irish Whiskey distillery.
About 25 years ago, Gallagher realized there are 17 places called Garrison in the U.S. His love of America, his home for the past 43 years, motivated him to visit each of them. After coming to New York, he has six left.
He had made mail-order purchases from Antipodean Books years ago, but his September visit was a revelation. “I didn’t know the business was in Garrison,” he says. “It was like, ‘Holy moly, this is a Garrison I haven’t been to. I killed two birds with one stone!’”
Gallagher believes exploring the American landscape requires objectives. “You can cross the country in a straight line, but seeing all the Garrisons brings me from place to place,” he explains.
Besides New York, he has been to a Garrison in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. Minnesota, Nebraska and Pennsylvania are yet to come, as well as return visits to New Mexico and North Dakota, which have two each.
Emblazoned souvenirs are hard to come by. Gallagher gets a letter with a Garrison postmark wherever possible, “but some places don’t even have a post office,” he says. “Some are just a few shacks, like Garrison near the Idaho-Montana border or the one in Colorado, a one-horse town.”
He speaks highly of Philipstown’s Garrison. “Truthfully, it’s the most beautiful,” he said. “That view across the river to West Point is gorgeous.”
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Gallagher usually travels in his Jeep. In the past, it often provided shelter, although he now relies on motels. “I’d never fly,” he says. “There’s too much to see.”
He mostly travels alone, although his wife, Kate, accompanied him to four Garrisons. “She’s good to travel with,” he says. “But usually, I couldn’t be bothered bringing somebody with me because I’d be driving along, see a sign for somewhere and just turn off. Women don’t like that.”
Though he left in his 20s, he returns to Garrison in Ireland to visit his brother and sister.
Asked what his family thinks of his Garrison pursuit, Gallagher says: “They probably don’t think I’m the full shilling since I started wandering about, but they understand me.”
As a young man, he was a painter, studied fine art in England, and traveled extensively in Europe. He moved to the U.S. at 27 and now lives in Los Angeles.
When he speaks of the residents of his Irish hometown, he describes them as the most hospitable people in the world.
“They’re the old Irish,” he says. “If you knock on the door and they’re eating their dinner, they’ll want you to come in and eat with them.”
My last question was about my 5-star rating for Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey. “Oh my god,” Gallagher says. “I love Tullamore Dew.” He dispatched his buddy Tommy Conway to deliver a bottle of the Dew to my attention care of an undisclosed location in Garrison (New York).
