Irish Boston History & Heritage

Irishman  Patrick S. Gilmore , the famous 19th century musician and bandleader, started the annual tradition of the New Year's Eve countdown in New York City on December 31, 1888.   On this particular New Year's eve, the Gilmore Band performed for the large audience that gathered up and down Broadway, and then Gilmore led the crowd in a countdown, firing two pistols at the stroke of midnight.  In 1891, Gilmore applied for and received permits from New York City to hold a special concert in  Times Square , which at the time was simply known as the Long Acre, according to Gilmore historian Jarlath McNamara .   The area was renamed Times Square in 1904 when the New York Times opened its offices there. After living in Boston for more than two decades, Gilmore started a new chapter in his life and career when he moved to New York City in 1873, where he led the 22nd Regiment Band. The Gilmore Band performed frequently in the city, and for the final two decades of his ...

  On Friday, December 28, 1877, an order was passed in Boston City Council to pay sculptor Martin Milmore "an additional $8,1000 for extra work and materials for Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument" on Boston Common, which had been unveiled on September 17, 1877. Milmore had been awarded the commission on December 30, 1870 to build the Soldiers and Sailors War Memorial on Flagstaff Hill, winning over fifteen other proposals. The cost was not to exceed $75,000.  But when Milmore moved to Rome, Italy, where he spent nearly five years working on his masterpiece, he had a change of heart about what material to use.  According to City Councilor Sampson, "Under the contract, Mr. Milmore was to furnish a granite statue. After going abroad to complete his models it was suggested to him by observations made there that granite would be rather bad material to make the statues of on account of the softness of the lines to be made, and on account of its liability to be defaced by...

Rev. John Moorhead, portrait by John Greenwood, 1750 Presbyterian Reverend John Moorhead, head of New England's first Scots-Irish congregation, died in Boston in December 1773, just as the America Revolution was about to start.  Formerly of Newtonards, County Down,   Moorhead had emigrated with his congregation of 30 parishioners, and  established the Church of the Presbyterian Strangers in 1729. They built an Irish Meeting House in a converted barn at the corner of Berry Street and Long Lane (now Channing and Federal Street).  As church historian Harriett E. Johnson writes in  Handbook of the Arlington Street Church , (1929) these Scots-Irish were “Good, quiet, law-abiding citizens . . .. [W]ith their sober, steadfast, hardworking, moral philosophy of life they constituted an excellent balance to the idealistic, variable [Puritan], who so often preached freedom, but practiced intolerance and bigotry.” The Church of the Presbyterian Strangers had prospered enoug...

Mrs. Muriel MacSwiney, widowed wife of Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney, visited Boston two months after her husband died on October 20, 1920, after a 74-day hunger strike protesting British rule in Ireland.   She came here to express her gratitude to the Boston Irish for their steadfast support of her husband during his imprisonment and subsequent hunger strike.  She was accompanied by Harry Boland, secretary to Ireland's President Eamonn deValera, and her sister in law, Miss Mary MacSwiney. During her visit, MacSwiney met with William Cardinal O'Connell, and later attended a dinner in her honor at the Copley Square Hotel, attended by numerous Boston Irish leaders. The following day, the visitors went to the State House, where she was received in the Hall of Flags, and invited to address the Massachusetts Senate.  Addressing the senate, Mrs. MacSwiney said, "It gives me great pleasure to thank you for the greeting that has been extended to me today. I never made a pu...

A new era in city government took hold on  Monday, January 5, 1885, when  Hugh O'Brien became  Boston's first Irish-born mayor.  O'Brien's victory at the polls in December finally  broke the hegemony of old-line Yankees who had run local government since Boston was incorporated as a city in 1822.  O'Brien defeated incumbent mayor Augustus Pearl Martin by 3, 124 votes, with more than 52,000 citizens casting their votes.  Once Mayor Martin heard the news, he sent a note to O'Brien cordially congratulating him on his victory.  O'Brien said in a statement that evening:  “As I have been elected, I am ready to assume the responsibilities of the position fearlessly and in good faith. In this connection I will say emphatically that there is no ring behind me, and there never will be. The nomination was tendered to and accepted by me without pledges of any kind, or of any name or nature. After living In Boston for upwards of half a century, being educ...

Charles E. Logue at Fenway Park Charles E. Logue (1858-1919), an Irish-born contractor from County Derry who build Fenway Park and dozens of churches, government building and schools throughout greater Boston, died suddenly on December 5, 1919 while working on the roof of St Mary's Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. According to news reports, Logue was about 100 feet above ground on staging, when he "seemed to stagger" and was helped by workmen before he fell to the ground. "Heart failure, caused by the exertion of climbing the ladder, was given as the cause of death," according to The Boston Globe. Logue had climbed the ladder with his son John, to inspect repair work being done on the church cupola. Logue and his wife Josephine were the parents of thirteen children, and lived at 24 Baker Place and later at Barry Street in Dorchester. In addition to his contracting career, Logue was appointed Schoolhouse Commissioner and a member of the Tenement House C...

On December 5, 1770, nine months to the day after the  Boston Massacre , two of the nine soldiers in the British regiment,  Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery, were found guilty of manslaughter for the killing of five local Boston men; the other seven soldiers were exonerated. The verdict was a culmination of a long and contentious trial fueled  by the now famous episode that took place on a wintry Monday night on March 5, 1770, when a deadly confrontation between occupying British soldiers and local Bostonians resulted in five townspeople being shot and killed.  Between March and December, Bostonians experienced a range of emotions: rage at the British Crown for putting armed forces in Boston, anti-Catholic sentiments directed at the soldiers, and finally, recognition that the trail had to appear fair-minded and just to the eyes of the world if the colonists were ever to make a case for independence.   On the night in question, five men - Samuel Gray Samuel Mav...