Irish Boston History & Heritage

Castle Island, located at 2010 William J. Day Boulevard, dates to 1634, when early Puritan settlers built a fort with mud walls. During the American Revolution, occupying British troops called it Fort William and held it until the Siege of Boston ended their occupation on March 17, 1776. Several Irish regiments in the British Army were stationed here, including the 29th Regiment whose soldiers were involved in the Boston Massacre , which killed five Bostonians on March 5, 1770. In 1799, U.S. President John Adams changed the name Fort Williams to Fort Independence , and today it is a National Historic Landmark. Writer Edgar Allan Poe was stationed at Fort Independence and wrote his famous story, The Cask of Amontillado.  It was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted who originally envisioned a plan to created South Boston’s Marine Park and connecting it to Castle Island by filling in some 600 acres of mudflats. That took nearly 50 years to achieve . In 1949, South Boston S...

Joseph Milmore was the model for the Sailor statue on the Soldiers & Sailors Monument,  Boston Common    Joseph Milmore (1841-1886), a preeminent sculptor and expert stone carver based in Boston, died in Geneva, Switzerland on January 10, 1886 at age 46, while traveling in Europe with his wife, Mary Longfellow. He contracted pleurisy and was bedridden for several weeks before his death. His remains were sent back to Boston, where he was buried at the Milmore family plot in Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain. Born in Sligo, Ireland in October 1842, Joseph and his four brothers emigrated to Boston in 1851 with their widowed mother, where they lived on Common Street. Joseph apprenticed in Boston as a cabinet maker, took up wood carving and then began carving in marble and granite, eventually becoming an expert carver. Martin Milmore Though his career, Joseph worked alongside his famous younger brother Martin Milmore (1844-1883), who received dozens of commissio...