Irish Boston History & Heritage

  The monument honoring Matthew Thornton was unveiled on September 29, 1892 in Merrimac, NH at his former home along the Merrimack River. Several thousand people were present at the ceremonies. He was one of the three men from New Hampshire to sign the Declaration of Independence, joining Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Kingston and Brig. Gen. William Whipple of Portsmouth.  Thornton has been described as a physician, soldier and patriot, who agitated against the Stamp Act of 1765, presided over the Provincial Congress in 1775, served in the State Senate, and was an associate justice of the Superior Court.    The monument was placed next to the cemetery where he was buried and across from the homestead where he lived in his final years.  New Hampshire Governor H. A. Tuttle spoke at the ceremony. Born in the Ulster Province in Ireland in 1714, Matthew was the son of James and Elizabeth Thornton, who emigrated to New England in 1717 in the first wave of Scots-Irish P...

 

Paul Revere Statue, courtesy of  Digital Commonwealth On September 22, 1940, the bronze statue of Paul Revere was unveiled at the Paul Revere Mall on Hanover Street in Boston's North End. A number of Revere's ancestors and descendants were present at the unveiling, along with many North Enders who returned to their neighborhood for the occasion. Some 10,000 people attended. Orator and Boston City Councillor Henry L. Shattuck gave a stirring patriotic tribute on the eve of World War II, telling the audience, "It is well we should honor and celebrate the achievements of Paul Revere and of our other heroes. It is just and fitting that we should sing their praises and take pride in their deeds. But that is not enough. These patriots did not live for their country and die for their country in order that we might live softly. They looked to us, their descendants, to pick up and carry on the of liberty." Thomas Cass Bronze Plaque, courtesy of IrishBoston.org   In addition t...

Photo couresty of NPS / Claire Hassler A bronze statue in Washington, DC honoring Robert Emmet was created in 1916 by Irish sculptor Jerome Connor (1874–1943), who used Emmet's own desk mask to model the face.  Emmet was an Irish nationalist and rebel who was hanged and beheaded at age 25 on September 20, 1803 on Thomas Street in Dublin, Ireland, after being convicted of high treason by the British government. Connor made three original castings of the Emmet statue.  The first casting was unveiled in June 28, 1917, at the main rotunda of the Smithsonian national museum in Washington DC.  US President Woodrow Wilson and his wife attended the event, along with and numerous dignitaries from the United States and Ireland and leaders of the Irish-American community. US Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White accepted the statue on behalf of the American people.  "About the statue will be draped the Stars and Stripes, and on the base will rest the Gaelic flag, so...

   On September 12, 1953, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier and US Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts were married at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Newport, RI. More than eight hundred guests attended the wedding. The bride's stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, walked her up the aisle. The ceremony was performed by Boston's Archbishop Richard Cushing , a friend of the Kennedy family, and he was assisted by four other priests, including the former president of Notre Dame and the head of the Christopher Society. Before the mass, a special blessing from Pope Pius XII was read, according to the John F. Kennedy Library archives. Tenor soloist Luigi Vena from Boston sang Gounod’s Ave Maria. The reception was held on the terrace of the 300 acre Auchincloss oceanfront estate, Hammersmith Farm, for more than 1,200 guests. The wedding cake, four feet tall, was ordered by Joseph P. Kennedy.  Meyer Davis and his orchestra played at the reception under a huge canopy.  St. Mary’s Chur...

  Photo Courtesy of National Museum of the U.S. Navy Photograph Collection In 1956, the heroic-sized statue of Commodore John Barry,"Father of the American Navy,"designed by American sculptor Wheeler Williams of Madison, CT was cast at the T.F. McCann & Sons Foundry in Somerville, MA before being shipped to Wexford, Ireland, where Barry was born in 1745. The statue was a gift of the people of the United States to the people of Ireland. US Congressman and Speaker of the House John McCormack from South Boston introduced the idea of selecting John Barry as the most suitable Irish-born hero in the American Revolution. He instructed Congressman John Rooney of Brooklyn, NY, to introduce a resolution for $30,000 for the memorial. Williams was selected by the American Battle Memorials Commission and President Harry S. Truman convened a national John Barry Commission, which included Robert Fitzgerald from Milton, MA. Williams began making sketches in 1954, and after the commission...

In fall 1926, Ellen O'Byrne DeWitt (1875-1926), an Irish immigrant who ran a successful Irish music store and record company in New York City, opened a new store called E. O'Bryne Dewitt's Sons: House of Irish Music, at 51 Warren Street in Roxbury. Located right in the heart of Dudley Square, the new shop was run by her son Justus O'Byrne DeWitt (1899-1983). The Boston store was an extension of a successful Irish music company in New York City that had flourished for a quarter century. It was run by Ellen and her husband, Dutch immigrant Justus DeWitt. Together they had run a small travel company for several years before Ellen decided to open the small Irish music shop at 1398 Third Avenue near 79th Street. With the swift rise of the recording industry in the early 20th century, Ellen was among the first to recognize that the burgeoning Irish immigrant population would always be looking out for music from back home, and she convinced several record companies su...

Hugh O'Brien of County Cork, the first Irish-born person to be elected as mayor of the city of Boston, died on August 1, 1895 in Somerville after a brief illness.   His funeral was held at  Holy Cross Cathedral , and "thousands of people thronged the cathedral to pay their last tribute of love and respect" to O'Brien, a local newspaper wrote. The Charitable Irish Society sent a five-foot high Irish harp, made of roses, orchards and lilys. "The largest and most conspicuous delegation was that from the St. Vincent's Orphan Asylum, 200 little children dressed alike, who sat immediately behind the family," Republic Newspaper reported. Born in Ireland on July 13, 1827, O'Brien emigrated with his family to Boston in 1832 when he was five years old. He attended a public school in Boston’s Fort Hill neighborhood, and at age 12 joined the Boston Courier newspaper as an apprentice. By the age of 15, he had become foreman of a printing office, before starting h...

  Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy was born on July 28, 1929 in Southampton, NY, the daughter of John and Janet.  She was an accomplished rider as a child, and attended Vassar College, University of Grenoble before transferring to George Washington University, where she earned a degree in French literature in 1951.  While working as a roving photo journalist for the Washington Times-Herald , she met her husband, John F. Kennedy, when he was a U.S. Congressman, soon to be U.S. Senator, according to the John F. Kennedy Library .  On September 12, 1953, Jackie and Jack married at St. Mary's Church in Newport, RI. She became First Lady at age 31 on January 20, 1961, when her husband took the oath of office to become the nation's 35th president. "With her gracious personal style and her passion for history and the arts, she worked hard to be worthy of her new role," notes the JFK Library. While she had a deep sense of obligation to her country, her first priorities were ...

On July 4, 1892, a massive hurling match took place on Boston Common, between the Shamrock hurling club of Boston and the William O'Brien club of Cambridge.  The winner received a $100 purse. Estimates varied from 10,000 to 20,00 spectators, according to Boston newspapers.  A detail of 100 patrolmen , including a lieutenant and four sergeants, were on-site for crowd control and to keep the pitch clear.  The game was set to begin at 7 a.m. but did not get underway until 8:15 a.m. Prior to the game, the William O'Brien Club entered a protest saying there were several ringers from Lynn playing for the Shamrocks.  In the end, the William O'Briens defeated the Shamrocks by a score of 2-1.   A few days after the match, on July 7, The Boston Globe   reported , "The members of the Shamrock Hurling Club still believe they superior players to the William O' Briens, who defeated them on the Common on July 4. and they challenge them or any hurling club in Massachusetts...

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 ...

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....