Irish Boston History & Heritage

Courtesy of Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, NH Acclaimed as America's greatest sculptor of the 19 th century, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was born on March 1, 1848 on Charlemount Street in Dublin at the height of the Irish Famine, when millions of Irish were fleeing Ireland to places like Boston, New York, Montreal, St. John and other eastern port cities.    His father Bernard Saint-Gaudens was a French cobbler who had "a wonderfully complex mixture of a fierce French accent and Irish brogue."   His mother, Mary McGuinness, was born in Bally Mahon, County Longford, to Arthur McGuinness and Mary Daly. According to his son Homer, when Augustus was six months old, "the famine in Ireland compelled (the family) to go to America."   They landed in Boston in September 1848, where they lived for six weeks until the father found work in New York City and sent for them.   Augustus apprenticed as a cameo cutter, a...

Photo from Boston Globe Archives In June, 1919, Irish political leader Eamon de Valera visited Boston and New England, a trip that included stops at historic American landmarks like Bunker Hill, Cambridge and Lexington, as well as a massive rally at Fenway Park on Sunday, June 29, 1919.   Dev arrived at  Boston’s South Station  on Saturday, June 28 with his secretary Harry J. Boland, and was greeted by scores of Irish supporters as he made his way to the  Copley Plaza Hotel  in Boston’s Back Bay.    A marching band led the triumphant procession through the streets of Boston. Basilica Church in Mission Hill, Roxbury      That evening, Dev visited the rectory at Mission Church in Roxbury, where his half-brother, Rev. Thomas Wheelwright , C.SS.R. was stationed.   After de Valera’s father died in 1885, Dev was sent back to Ireland where he was raised by his relatives.   His mother Catherine Coll of Bruee, Limerick ...

Boston's  Irish Famine Memorial  was unveiled before a crowd of 7,000 people on Sunday, June 28, 1998 at the corner of School and Washington Street along Boston's  Freedom Trail  and  Irish Heritage Trail . The $1 million Memorial commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine which occurred in Ireland between 1845-1849, killing nearly one million people and forcing another two million people to emigrate to  Boston, New York, Halifax and other eastern seaboard cities. The memorial project was headed by the late  Thomas J. Flatley , along with  Michael Cummings  and others from the Boston community.   The Boston Irish Famine Memorial is part of the city's Irish Heritage Trail.   For year round details on Boston's Irish cultural community, visit  IrishMassachusetts.com .

John Boyle O'Reilly , the famous Irish rebel who lived in Boston's Charlestown neighborhood from 1870 until his death, was b orn on June 28, 1844 in Dowth Castle along the River Boyne. Conscripted into the British Army as a young man, O'Reilly was later charged with sedition against the British Crown and sentenced to life imprisonment in an Australian penal colony.  O’Reilly made a daring escape aboard a New Bedford whaler,  Gazelle , in 1869, a feat that helped shape his legend by the time he landed in America.   Arriving in Boston in 1870, he spent the next 20 years reconciling the city's racial and ethnic factions who struggled against one another.  He became editor and then owner of  The Pilot ,  the leading Irish Catholic paper in America, using the paper as a bully pulpit to advance various causes.  He befriended the Yankee establishment while admonishing them for the p...

Photo Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation W. B. Yeats, Ireland’s influential poet and writer, born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, had a longstanding connection to Boston dating back to his early days as a poet.   The Boston Pilo t , a weekly Irish Catholic newspaper, is said to have published his first poem on August 6, 1887, when Yeats had just turned 22. It was titled was "How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent,” in which he compared the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 with political circumstances in 1880s Ireland. We, too, have seen our bravest and our best To prison go, and mossy ruin rest, Where houses once whitened vale and mountain crest, Therefore, O nation of the bleeding breast, Libations from the Hungary of the West. Yeats’ found his way into The Pilot thanks to its editor, John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-90), who was also a poet of note as well as an activist leader in pursuing Irish freedom. Many years later,   Yeats was feted at a luncheon in...

On June 6, 1919, the US Senate passed a resolution by a 60 to 1 vote, “earnestly requesting” the Paris Peace Congress give a hearing to the Irish representatives who wished to present the case of Irish freedom.   The resolution was introduced by Indiana Senator William Borah . At issue was the British Government’s refusal to allow  EamonDe Valera and his colleagues to travel to the post-World War I conference in Paris to state their case for an independent Ireland.   Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts made a forceful speech just before the vote, threatening that the Senate would intervene in foreign relations if US President Woodrow Wilson remained silent on the issue.   Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts added an amendment to the senate resolution: Resolved: That the Senate of the United States express its sympathy with the aspirations of the Irish people for a government of its own choice.” Meanwhile in Paris, Frank...

Homemade, authentic Irish bread seemed to be a fashionable topic in Boston throughout 1959, with dozens of recipes for Irish soda bread appearing in The Boston Globe and other local newspapers. "Irish bread has many delicious variations," notes a headline in the Globe in March 1959. Described intermittently as soda bread, raisin bread, currant bread and griddle bread, the recipes came from professional cooks and Irish immigrants, including a printed recipe that was "used by the St. Columban Sisters." Irish bread was also advertised in the Globe by Goodbody's Irish Soda Mix, a new product on the market that allowed Boston families to make their own soda bread from a mix.  It was described as "a fruit-filled, crisp-crusted breakfast delight, dinner treat, party favorite." And O'Connell's Irish Oatmeal Bread, made and distributed by American company Bond Bakers advertised heavily in the Globe from June through October.  The advertisin...