Irish Boston History & Heritage

On the Charles River Esplanade running alongside Beacon Hill and Back Bay along the Boston side of the river is the famous Hatch Memorial Shell, the site of the free annual Boston Pops Concert & Fireworks Spectacular held each year on July 4, Independence Day.  The Boston Pops is led by maestro Keith Lockhart. There are two statues in front of the Hatch Shell that pay tribute to Boston Irish politicians in the 20th century who each made notable contributions to Massachusetts.  David I. Walsh  (1872-1947) was the first Irish Catholic elected as Governor of Massachusetts, where he served from 1914-1916.  Prior to that, he was Lieutenant Governor in1913-14.  A native of Clinton, Walsh was best known as an “ardent supporter of women’s suffrage and fought hard for a voting-rights amendment to the state constitution,” according to historian Thomas H. O’Connor.  In 1918 Walsh won a Senate seat, becoming the state's first Irish Catholic to win, as well as...

Matthew Arbuckle One of Scotland's most famous musicians of the 19th century was Matthew Arbuckle, who made his name in America as an exceptional cornetist.  He was also a composer and bandleader as well as an accomplished violinist, bagpiper and drum major. Coliseum of the World Peace Jubilee in Boston He performed at the National Peace Jubilee in Boston in June 1869 for U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, and again at the World Peace Jubilee in June 1872, which was the largest music festival ever assembled and included 2,000 musicians and 20,000 singers.   At the 1872 festival, Arbuckle conducted Handel's famous "Let the Bright Seraphim," leading the opening fanfare of fifty trumpeters and playing the trumpet obbligato part with vocalist Madame Ermina Ruggersdorf.  After the Jubilee ended, Arbuckle participated in a special concert for Austria's visiting composer Johann Strauss, perfuming a cornet solo that demanded an encore. Born in Lochside, Scotland, on March 2...

  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 ...