Irish Boston History & Heritage

George M. Cohan , famed Broadway song and dance man whose songs helped define the World War I generation, was born in Providence RI on July 3, 1878.   A  statue honoring Cohan at the corner of Wickendon and Governor Streets in Providence   was created by noted sculptor  Robert Shure , who also created   the  Irish Famine Memorial in Boston  and  Providence .  Cohan (1878-1942) was the son of Jeremiah Cohan from Boston and Nellie Costigan from Providence.  They met met on the vaudeville circuit and married in 1874.  George and his sister Josephine became part of a successful family troupe, named the Four Cohans, which traveled around the country on the minstrel circuit, performing a cabaret of songs, dances, jokes and comedy routines popular at the time.  In 1893 George settled in New York City and soon became the  toast of Broadway , writing popular tunes like Yankee Doodle Dandy, You're a Grand Ol...

America's first great portrait artist, John Singleton Copley (1737-1815) was born in Boston on July 3, 1738.  He was  the son of Irish immigrants who emigrated to Boston in the 1730s. Copley Square Park in Boston's Back Bay was named in his honor in 1883. In 2002, the city of Boston unveiled a statue to  John Singleton Copley  by artist Lewis Cohen, and it is now on the  Boston Irish Heritage Trail . John's parents, Richard Copley and Mary Singleton from County Clare, were married in Limerick before emigrating. His father died in the West Indies just after their son was born, leaving his mother to raise John by working at a shop in Boston that sold tobacco down by the docks.  In 1747 Mary S. Copley married Peter Pelham, a colonial artist and an original member of the Charitable Irish Society formed in 1737. Pelham helped to nurture his stepson's talent, and by age twenty Copley had already gained a reputation as a promising artist. His first...

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, and in ...

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...