Irish Boston History & Heritage

  On June 17, 1776, two British Navy transports, the George and Annabella, sailed into Boston Harbor, unaware that the British had been driven out of Boston two months earlier, on March 17, 1776, Evacuation Day. The two ships were carrying 185 Scottish Highlanders of the 71st British Regiment of Foot, newly formed by General Simon Fraser. Sir Archibald Campbell In command of the Regiment was Sir Archibald Campbell KB (21 August 1739 – 31 March 1791) a British officer.  Historian J. L. Bell reports that Campbell later wrote a letter to General Howe, saying that he had been at sea for seven weeks, "during the course of which we had not an opportunity of speaking to a single vessel that could give us the smallest information of the British troops having evacuated Boston." A story in The Boston Globe , dated June 17, 1926, wrote, "They approached the coast, expecting to find General Howe still comfortably fixed at Boston. They found instead a fleet of hornets awaiting them ...

Labor organizer and women's rights advocate  Margaret Lillian Foley  (1873-1957) was born to a working class Irish-American family  at Meeting House Hill in Dorchester, Boston's largest neighborhood.    With only a high school education from Girls' High School in Roxbury, Foley had a daring personality and a "voice like a trumpet."    She worked in a hat factory organizing women workers and was a board member of the Women's Trade Union League, founded in Boston in 1903 by  Mary Kenney O'Sullivan  as part of the American Federal of Labor.  As equal rights issues moved from the workplace to the political front, Foley became involved with the campaign to let women vote in all government elections, becoming  a member of the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association.  During this time, she earned and enjoyed the nickname The Grand Heckler for her willingness to confront male politicians in public settings such as the Boston St...

On June 11, 1837 a brawl erupted in downtown  Boston  when an Irish funeral procession and a volunteer fire brigade returning to the station reached an intersection at the same time.    In what became known as the  Broad Street Riot , the firemen and their supporters chased the Irish along Purchase and Broad streets into their houses, which were then attacked by the enraged mob.    “The air was full of flying feathers and straw from the beds which had been ripped up and emptied into the streets,” wrote Boston historian  J.B. Cullen .    Mayor Samuel A. Eliot  ordered 800 National Lancers, a military group, to quell the riot and maintain peace.   Read this letter of complaint about the mistreatment of the Irish by the firemen.   Artist Thomas Nast's depiction of Irish immigrants as apes, 1867 The riot was part of an escalating anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment among nativist Bostonians whose jobs were being threatened by...

 The National Park Service is planning to remove several quotation boards at Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, MA that pertain to slavery, women's suffrage, veterans and immigrants.  The action comes as a result of a nationwide directive issued by the Secretary of the Interior in May 2025 as a lead-up to America 250 celebrations.   The quotes hang in the Bunker Hill Lodge, at the entrance to the Bunker Hill Monument, and offer modern interpretation of what the Monument means to multiple groups of people.  The passage about 'foreign-born men' being excluded from the American Revolution pertains specifically to Irish immigrants living in Boston and Charlestown in 1875.  It was extracted from an editorial in  The Boston Pilot , an influential Catholic weekly newspaper with a national readership in the 19th century.   This is the passage in full, published in The Boston Pilot on May 8, 1875: The struggle to tell the story of America has always been a ...

Colonel Thomas Cass Statue, Boston Public Garden Boston Civil War hero Thomas Cass, commander of the  Massachusetts Ninth Regiment , was born on June 4, 1821 in Farmleigh, Queen's County (now County Laois).  His family immigrated to Boston when he was an infant, and settled in the North End, at that time a heavily Irish neighborhood. Cass was a member of the Boston School Committee and a successful businessman.  During the 1850s, he organized a local militia unit of Irish immigrants known as the Columbian Artillery but the group was dismantled by the nativist Know-Nothing movement in 1855.  When the Civil War broke out, and with the encouragement of  Governor John Andrew , Cass gathered his men to form Boston's first Irish troop, the Ninth Regiment. Colonel Cass reported with the regiment of 1,022 men at the State House on Tuesday, June 25, 1861, to receive the state flag and to be reviewed by Governor Andrew.    Fellow Irish immigrant  Patrick S....

John Fitzgerald Kennedy , 35th president of the United States, was born at about three o'clock in the afternoon on May 29, 1917 at 83 Beale Street in Brookline, Massachusetts.  John was the second son of  Patrick Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy , named in honor of his maternal grandfather,  John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald .  In the book, Rose Kennedy's Family Album, published in 2013, Rose Kennedy writes: "When a mother holds her first baby in her arms, what awe-inspiring thoughts go fleeting through her mind and fill her heart. A child has been bestowed upon her to mold and to influence - what a challenge, what a joy! ...On her judgement he relies, and her words will influence him, not for a day or a month or a year, but for time and for eternity - and perhaps for future generations. A grandmother, an aunt, a teacher may guide the child temporarily, but when the mother enters the room, it is to her he turns for the final judgement. "A mother knows that...