The Atlantic Crossing: From Turnip to Pumpkin

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They came across the ocean carrying more than belongings. In the holds of coffin ships and immigrant vessels, fleeing famine and desperation, Irish and Scottish emigrants brought invisible cargo—stories, beliefs, protections carved into memory as deeply as faces were carved into turnips.

They arrived in a new world that had never heard of Stingy Jack, had never feared the aos sí, had never carved a turnip lantern against the thinning veil. But America had something Ireland and Scotland never possessed: fields full of pumpkins, waiting to be transformed.

This is the story of how an ancient Celtic tradition crossed the Atlantic, adapted to new soil, and became America’s most beloved autumn ritual. This is the story of survival, transformation, and how immigrants kept their protective magic alive in a foreign land.

This is the story of the crossing.

To understand why the tradition came to America, you must first understand what drove millions from their homeland.

In 1845, a devastating blight swept through Ireland’s potato fields. Phytophthora infestans—a fungal disease that turned potatoes to rotting, inedible mush—destroyed the crop that fed the majority of Ireland’s rural poor. The blight returned in 1846, and again in 1847, and again in subsequent years, creating what became known as the Great Famine, or in Irish, An Gorta Mór—the Great Hunger.

Over the course of seven years, approximately one million people died of starvation and disease. Another two million emigrated, fleeing a land that could no longer sustain them. By 1855, nearly a quarter of Ireland’s population was gone—dead or displaced.

The statistics are staggering, but they cannot capture the human devastation. Entire villages were abandoned. Families were torn apart. The Irish language and traditional ways of life suffered catastrophic losses. Those who survived faced an impossible choice: stay and starve, or leave everything behind and seek survival across the Atlantic.

Scotland faced its own hardships—potato blight compounded by the ongoing Highland Clearances, in which tenant farmers were evicted to make way for sheep grazing. The Clearances, which had begun in the late 18th century and continued through the 19th, combined with blight and economic hardship to drive hundreds of thousands of Scots to emigrate during this period.

These immigrants—Irish and Scottish, desperate and dispossessed—carried with them the only wealth that couldn’t be confiscated: their culture, their stories, their traditions. Including the practice of carving protective faces into vegetables and lighting them against the darkness of Samhain night.

The journey itself was a horror that rivaled what they fled.

Immigrants who could afford passage booked spaces on ships bound for America, primarily arriving at ports in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Those who couldn’t afford even the cheapest tickets sometimes took passage to Canada, where fares were lower, then made their way south across the border.

The vessels became known as “coffin ships”—a grimly accurate name. Packed into steerage with minimal food, no sanitation, and diseases spreading rapidly in the confined quarters, many never survived the six-to-eight-week voyage. Typhus, dysentery, and cholera killed thousands at sea. Bodies were wrapped in canvas and thrown overboard. Some ships lost a third of their passengers before reaching port.

Those who survived arrived traumatized, weakened, and facing an uncertain future in a country that did not particularly want them. “No Irish Need Apply” signs appeared in shop windows. Immigrants were stereotyped as dirty, criminal, and dangerous. They clustered in urban slums—places like Five Points in New York City—where disease and poverty continued to claim lives.

Yet they endured. They found work—brutal work in factories, on railroads, in mines, as domestic servants. They sent money back to Ireland to bring over family members who remained. They built churches and communities. They held onto their identity in a hostile land.

And when October came, they remembered Samhain.

In America, Irish and Scottish immigrants found themselves in a strange position. The Protestant-dominated culture viewed their Catholic faith with suspicion. Their accents marked them as foreign. Their poverty made them unwelcome. But their folk traditions—including Samhain customs—existed below the radar of religious and social persecution.

In immigrant communities, particularly in the northeastern cities and rural areas where Irish and Scottish settlers clustered, the old traditions continued. Families still gathered on the night when October turned to November. They still told stories of the aos sí and the thinning veil. They still honored their dead.

But the traditions began to change, shaped by new circumstances.

In Ireland and Scotland, Samhain had been a community affair centered around bonfires and collective ritual. In America, particularly in cities, large communal bonfires were impractical or forbidden. The celebrations moved indoors or became more private, family-centered affairs.

The guising tradition continued, but transformed. Irish and Scottish children in America still dressed in costumes and went door-to-door, performing songs or recitations in exchange for food or coins. What we now call trick-or-treating gradually evolved out of these practices, with the modern phrase taking hold in the early 20th century.

The honoring of the dead continued, though now in a land where many of the dead had been left behind in Irish and Scottish soil, buried in graves the emigrants would never see again. The feast for the ancestors took on a particularly poignant quality for people whose ancestors were an ocean away.

And the carved lanterns—those protective faces meant to guard against spirits on the night when the veil grew thin—those continued too. But here, the immigrants faced a problem: turnips were not common in America. Rutabagas could be found, but they were expensive and not always available.

The solution was growing in fields across the American landscape, abundant and cheap and perfectly suited to carving: the pumpkin.

Pumpkins are native to North America. Indigenous peoples had been cultivating them for thousands of years before European contact. The word “pumpkin” itself derives from the Greek pepōn (large melon), through French pompon, to English pumpion, finally settling into its modern form.

For Irish and Scottish immigrants in the mid-19th century, pumpkins were a revelation.

Where turnips were small, dense, and difficult to carve—requiring significant strength and sharp tools to hollow out the tough, fibrous flesh—pumpkins were large, with soft, easily removed interiors. A turnip lantern might take an hour of hard labor to create. A pumpkin could be carved in a fraction of the time.

Where turnips were expensive or scarce in American markets, pumpkins were abundant and cheap, especially in autumn. Farmers grew them in vast quantities. They were everywhere.

Where a turnip provided a small surface for carving a face, a pumpkin’s size offered a much larger canvas. The faces could be more elaborate, more detailed, more frightening.

The practical advantages were overwhelming. By the 1850s and 1860s, Irish and Scottish immigrants had largely switched from turnips to pumpkins for their carved lanterns. The tradition adapted seamlessly. The purpose remained the same—protection against spirits on the night when the veil grew thin—but the medium had transformed.

Crucially, the pumpkin also helped the tradition spread beyond immigrant communities. Anglo-American children saw the carved pumpkins and wanted to make their own. The practice was foreign enough to be exciting, but not so foreign as to be completely alien. It was festive, autumnal, and—stripped of its deeper spiritual significance—simply fun.

The carved pumpkin lantern, born from ancient Celtic protective magic, became an American phenomenon.

The connection between these carved lanterns and Stingy Jack—the Irish tale of the damned blacksmith wandering with his turnip ember—was already established in Ireland. Irish immigrants brought both the story and the practice with them.

Historical references show the term “jack-o’-lantern” being used for carved vegetables in various spellings throughout the mid-19th century. In 1837, the Limerick Chronicle mentioned a “Jack McLantern” competition. Variations included “Hoberdy’s Lantern” and “Hob-o’-Lantern,” but “jack-o’-lantern” gradually became standard.

The name perfectly captured the tradition’s dual nature: it referenced the folktale of Jack’s eternal wandering, but it also simply meant a lantern—any lantern—carried by someone named Jack (a generic everyman name). It was both specific and universal, folkloric and practical.

As the carved pumpkin tradition spread through American culture in the 1850s and 1860s, the name came with it. Americans who had never heard the full tale of Stingy Jack still used the term “jack-o’-lantern” for their carved pumpkins. The name had transcended its origin story.

By 1866, the term appeared in American publications with increasing frequency. And then, in 1867, came an image that would help cement the tradition across the nation.

On the pages of Harper’s Weekly—one of America’s most popular and influential magazines—an illustration appeared showing carved pumpkins with recognizable jack-o’-lantern faces.

This was not the first appearance of carved pumpkins in American print—earlier references exist, including in the Daily News of Kingston, New York, in 1866. But Harper’s Weekly was different. Its national circulation meant hundreds of thousands of readers across the country saw the illustration, helping to popularize what had been primarily a regional immigrant tradition.

The illustration appeared in a context that merged immigrant Irish traditions with broader American autumn celebrations. The magazine’s wide circulation meant that people across the United States—not just in Irish immigrant communities—now saw carved pumpkins as part of autumn festivities.

The timing was significant. The Civil War had ended just two years earlier. The nation was rebuilding, and there was a hunger for celebrations, traditions, and communal activities that could unite rather than divide. Harvest festivals and autumn celebrations provided that opportunity.

The carved pumpkin, with its Irish and Scottish roots but its thoroughly American medium, became a symbol of autumn itself—a tradition that anyone could participate in, regardless of background. It was becoming democratized, secularized, and nationalized.

By the 1870s and 1880s, carved pumpkins were appearing at autumn parties, harvest festivals, and the emerging Halloween celebrations across America. The practice had escaped its immigrant origins and become mainstream.

As jack-o’-lanterns spread, so too did Halloween itself—though it looked very different from the Samhain traditions that had inspired it.

Through the late 19th century, Halloween in America was becoming less about spiritual protection and more about community celebration. The frightening aspects remained—costumes, ghost stories, pranks—but they were increasingly framed as entertainment rather than genuine supernatural precaution.

The Irish and Scottish belief in the thinning veil, the aos sí, the need for protective lanterns—these faded from popular understanding. Most Americans who carved pumpkins in the 1880s and 1890s had no idea they were continuing an ancient Celtic protective ritual. They carved pumpkins because it was festive, because it was fun, because it was what you did in October.

The tradition had undergone what scholars call “folklorization”—the process by which a practice rooted in genuine belief becomes a custom maintained for cultural rather than spiritual reasons. The form remained, but the original purpose had been largely forgotten.

Yet something essential persisted. Even as Americans forgot why they carved jack-o’-lanterns, they continued to carve frightening faces, to place them in windows and on doorsteps, to light them with candles as darkness fell. The protective symbolism remained encoded in the practice itself, preserved through ritual repetition even when the reasoning was lost.

By 1900, Halloween was firmly established as an American holiday, and the jack-o’-lantern was its primary symbol. Postcards featured carved pumpkins. Parties were decorated with them. Children made them in schools. The pumpkin had become so associated with Halloween that it was difficult to imagine one without the other.

The Atlantic crossing was complete. An Irish tradition had become an American icon.

The early 20th century saw Halloween transform again, this time becoming explicitly child-centered and commercialized.

In the 1920s and 1930s, communities across America faced a problem: Halloween pranks were getting out of hand. What had been relatively harmless mischief—soaping windows, tipping over outhouses—escalated into property destruction and occasional violence. “Hell Night” or “Mischief Night” became genuinely dangerous in some cities.

Community leaders, parent-teacher associations, and civic organizations responded by attempting to domesticate Halloween. They organized supervised parties, costume parades, and community celebrations designed to channel youthful energy into acceptable activities. The strategy was to give children something to do that didn’t involve vandalism.

This coincided with the rise of trick-or-treating as a standardized practice. While door-to-door solicitation for treats had existed in various forms for decades (rooted in the old guising tradition), it became widespread and formalized in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1950s, trick-or-treating was the dominant Halloween activity for American children.

The jack-o’-lantern fit perfectly into this new, domesticated Halloween. It was:

• Child-friendly: Kids could participate in carving (with parental supervision)

• Decorative: It made homes look festive and welcoming

• Non-threatening: Scary, but in a fun way, not a genuinely frightening way

• Commercially viable: Stores could sell carving kits, patterns, and pumpkins themselves

Magazines and newspapers began publishing pumpkin carving templates. Competitions for best-carved pumpkins became common. The activity became a family tradition, a way for parents and children to prepare for Halloween together.

The protective ward against malevolent spirits had become a craft project.

Today, carved pumpkins are ubiquitous every October. Americans purchase over 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins annually, with a significant portion destined to become jack-o’-lanterns. Illinois alone grows over 40% of the nation’s pumpkins, much of it specifically for carving.

The tradition has evolved in ways the Irish immigrants of the 1840s could never have imagined:

Elaborate artistry: Modern carving tools and techniques allow for incredibly detailed designs. Some carved pumpkins are genuine works of art, depicting faces, landscapes, or intricate patterns far beyond the simple triangular eyes and toothy grins of earlier eras.

Competitive carving: Events like the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze in Sleepy Hollow, New York, feature thousands of hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins displayed as elaborate sculptural installations. The world record for most simultaneously lit jack-o’-lanterns—30,128—was set in Boston in 2006.

Themed designs: While traditional scary faces remain popular, modern jack-o’-lanterns might depict popular culture characters, political figures, or abstract designs. The “jack” in jack-o’-lantern has become detached from any particular face.

Preservation of tradition: Despite modernization, some families still maintain older practices. They still carve on Halloween night or the evening before. They still place candles (or now, LED lights) inside. They still set them on porches and in windows as October ends.

What has been almost entirely lost is the original purpose. If you ask most Americans why they carve pumpkins for Halloween, they’ll say “because it’s tradition” or “because it’s fun.” Almost none will mention spiritual protection, warding off the aos sí, or honoring the dead on the night when the veil grows thin.

Yet the symbolism persists in the practice itself. We still carve frightening faces—faces meant to ward off something. We still place them at thresholds—doorways and windows, the vulnerable points between inside and outside. We still light them as darkness falls—maintaining the fire that pushes back the dark.

The original beliefs may be forgotten, but the ritual continues. The form preserves the function, even when we no longer remember what that function was.

There is something profound in this continuity. A practice that began as genuine spiritual protection, carved by Celtic peoples who truly believed malevolent spirits walked on Samhain night, has persisted for over a thousand years and crossed an ocean, adapted to new circumstances, been stripped of its original context, commercialized, and domesticated—and yet it continues.

Every October, millions of families repeat a ritual their ancestors performed out of genuine fear and desperate hope. They don’t know why they’re really doing it. They don’t remember the aos sí or the Dullahan or the púca. They don’t think about the Great Famine or the coffin ships or the desperate immigrants trying to preserve their culture in a hostile land.

They just know: in October, you carve a pumpkin. You make a face. You light it from within. You set it where it can be seen.

And in doing so, they maintain—however unknowingly—one of humanity’s oldest traditions: the creation of light in darkness, protection against the unknown, and the acknowledgment that some nights are different from others, that some nights require guardians.

The Irish and Scottish immigrants who first carved American pumpkins in the 1840s and 1850s would likely be astonished by what their tradition became. The scale, the ubiquity, the transformation from sacred protection to secular celebration—all of it would be strange to them.

But they would recognize the essential act: the carving of a face, the lighting of a flame, the placement at the threshold. They would recognize the continuation of something they carried from the old world to the new.

And perhaps they would be pleased to know that their tradition—adapted, transformed, barely understood—endures. That the protective magic they brought across the Atlantic in their hearts and memories became woven so deeply into American culture that it will likely persist for generations to come.

The pumpkin replaced the turnip. America replaced Ireland and Scotland. Halloween replaced Samhain. Celebration replaced genuine belief.

But the carved face still watches from the window. The flame still flickers against the darkness. And every October, whether we know it or not, we continue the ancient practice:

We light lanterns against the night.

We place guardians at our doors.

We acknowledge, even if only symbolically, that the veil grows thin.

From Celtic soil to American earth.

From turnip to pumpkin.

From sacred protection to beloved tradition.

The lantern crossed the Atlantic.

And the light still burns.