Eugene Bowdren

Eugene Bowdren was a mason of Evergreen Street in Cork, the son of a stonemason from County Wexford, and one of a family of masons three generations deep. In the 1901 census he was twenty-two and living with his parents and seven brothers and sisters. He married Mary Anne Treacy at the Cathedral in Cork in June 1902, which joined two families of the same demanding trade. The mason was the aristocrat of the building trades, a man who served years to his craft and carried it in his hands and his eye, and the stone these men cut and laid is Victorian Cork: the quays, the churches, the terraces the city still lives in.