St. Patrick's Day

The St. Patrick's Day parade is more American than Irish. The first recorded parades were held not in Ireland but in the American colonies. Irish soldiers serving in the British army marched in New York in the 1760s, and Boston had St. Patrick's Day observances even earlier. In Ireland, for a long time the day was mostly a religious feast, and big public parades came later.

Patrick himself lived in the 5th century. He was born in Roman Britain, carried off to Ireland as a young man by raiders, escaped, and later returned as a Christian missionary. Much of what is said about him is legend. The story that he used the 3-leafed shamrock to explain the Trinity is a later tradition, but it stuck, and the shamrock became the symbol of the day and of Ireland.

The holiday grew in America because the Irish came in great numbers. The Great Famine of the late 1840s, when the potato crop failed year after year, drove more than a million people out of Ireland, and many of them came to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. They faced hard prejudice. Marching through the main streets of the city on March 17 became a way of showing their numbers and their place in American life, and Irish societies, churches and political clubs organized the parades.

The pictures in a collection like this often come from the postcard craze of the early 1900s. Millions of St. Patrick's Day cards were printed, many in Germany, with embossed shamrocks, harps, clay pipes, pigs, leprechauns and green ribbons. Some are sentimental, and some lean on old stereotypes of the Irish that were common in cartoons of the time. Photographs show parades with bands, marching societies with banners, and crowds on the sidewalks.

In parade pictures from around 1900, notice the formality. Marchers wear dark suits, sashes and top hats, and the societies carry large painted banners. The green beer and the dyed river came much later.