[citation needed] Another factor was the growth of small shops; one estimate has County Mayo shopkeepers extending some £200,000 in credit by August 1879, which had been steadily accumulated since the relatively bad harvest of 1877.
Aid also arrived from the United States (which now had a considerable Irish American population because of the previous famine), with public support further aroused by journalists such as James Redpath at the New-York Tribune, who contributed vivid, moving reports of the misery in Ireland.
[2] Unlike earlier famines, what is sometimes called the "mini-famine" of 1879 was not marked by many deaths, mainly increased hunger, and was largely focused in the west of Ireland, in the province of Connacht.
Historians have noted the appearance of a religious revival during the famine months, most famously a Marian apparition at a church in Knock, County Mayo.
Because of the short period it covered, and the low number of deaths compared to the earlier great famines, the 1879 famine is rarely remembered in Irish history, except as a footnote to the battle for the Three Fs (fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale) being waged by Davitt and the Land League, and as a factor in the Land War of the late 1870s and early 1880s.