Irish Boston History & Heritage

One of Boston’s most interesting sculptures,  Bacchante and Infant Faun , is displayed in the courtyard of the  Boston Public Library  in Copley Square, Back Bay.  The masterpiece was created in 1893 by American-born sculptor  Frederick MacMonnies , a disciple of  Augustus Saint-Gaudens . MacMonnies gave the original casting to his friend, architect  Charles Follen McKim , whose own masterpiece, the Boston Public Library, was being built.  McKim in turn offered it as a gift to the Library, which installed it.  But an outcry ensued from opponents who objected to the nudity of Bacchante, the Goddess of Wine, and McKim withdrew the gift, giving it instead to the  Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The controversy over the censorship of the artwork gained MacMonnies a certain notoriety, and he made numerous replicas of the work which he sold to museums and bronze statuettes, which he sold wholesale to...

Born on June 28, 1844 in Dowth Castle along the River Boyne, O'Reilly was conscripted into the British Army as a young man.  He 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 prejudices.   O'Reilly defended American Blacks who were still looking for post Civil War equality. ...

On August 11, 1834, the Ursuline Convent, a Catholic-run school for girls of all denominations, was set afire by angry workmen who were resentful of an increasing Irish presence in the Town of Charlestown and throughout New England. The night of terror was led by John Buzzell, a New Hampshire transplant who worked as a bricklayer. The frightened nuns and their young female boarding students rushed from the school as the building went up in flames, with the bloodthirsty mob intent on burning it to the ground. A newspaper later reported that the “pianos and harps, thrown from the windows when the Convent was set on fire, were subsequently burnt, and nothing but an old chair and one or two worthless articles were saved from destruction.” But the following week, the Boston Morning Post issued a front-page notice by the school's Mother Superior, suggesting that valuable items, especially musical instruments such as "Piano Ports, Harps, Guitars, Silver Cups were stolen at...

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 ...