Dennis Clark states that “During the 1850s, immigrants who
could afford to return to Ireland would have recourse to intelligence offices. These
offices were fixtures in the immigrant communities. They combined the business of making travel
arrangements with employment referral, sending remittances, and holding mail
and packages …” He goes on to say that “by the 1880s, intelligence offices had
become rare and had been replaced by steamship agents” [1].
Elsewhere it has been claimed that the first “private”
employment agencies sprang up in the 1890s in the United States [2].
Frances A. Kellor, writing in the
early 1900s, has an entire chapter on then contemporary domestic service and intelligence
offices or “intelligence agencies” [3].
It seems that these latter “offices,” whose services were
designed to reach a wider population, may be considered the precursors to
modern employment agencies in the U. S., whereas the intelligence office I am
looking for in Hartford (if it existed in 1867) would have catered to immigrants.
It seems likelier that major port cities like New York and
Boston and ports of exit and entry like Hartford's would have had them, rather than a city that didn’t have a port. Hopefully the Connecticut State Library will have an answer, but I have a hunch Philo would have wanted more than one employment reference from anyone applying for the nurse's position.
Notes:
[1] Clark,
Dennis. 1982. The Irish
Relations: Trials of an Immigrant
Tradition. Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, p. 78-79; Google Books
(http://www.books.google.com :
accessed 25 October 2013).
[2] See,
for example, Wikipedia’s article on “Employment agency,” Wikipedia (http://www.en.wikipedia.org : accessed 25
October 2013).
[3]
Kellor, Frances. 1915 [First published
1904]. Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment. New York, N.Y: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 194-235. Google Books (http://www.books.google.com : accessed 25
October 2013).
