The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
By Clare Dignan WE’RE PROUD OF IRELAND
A CENTURY OF ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADES IN THE ELM CITY
NEW HAVEN — When Irish immigrants landed in port cities across the country centuries ago, they brought their patron saint and traditions with them.
One of the most recognizable and popular traditions of Irish culture became the celebration of St. Patrick’s feast day March 17.
The people of Ireland have celebrated the feast day of the country’s patron saint for centuries and nothing can be mentioned of the origins of the New Haven St. Patrick’s Day Parade without mention of the people who founded it.
But long before that parade, Irish people began arriving in Connecticut in the 1630s, and they continued to arrive in steadily increasing numbers to the point that today Connecticut has the eighth-largest concentration of people with Irish origins in the U.S. with 17 percent of its population of Irish ancestry and descent, according to the site Irish Central.
Observances of St. Patrick’s Day have deep roots in Irish culture, with the first feast day in the saint’s honor listed in the Irish legal calendar in 1607, according to Timothy Meagher, author of The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. Ordinary Irish peasants and farmers observed the day early on at Catholic Masses and in home rituals. Wearing shamrocks or bits of green ribbon were also common before the eighteenth century.
While observance of the day goes far back into history, it was in the U.S. that mass public commemorations, such as dinners, concerts and especially parades, became common to celebrate the day, Meagher wrote. “It was also in America that St. Patrick’s Day become the traditional principal holiday of the Irish Catholic community.”
“Invented in America from a variety of sources, St. Patrick’s Day commemorations, particularly parades, were then exported back to Ireland,” he wrote.
St. Patrick’s Day commemorations locally would draw from rituals in Ireland and other elements of Irish culture, such as pattern day celebrations in Ireland that honored local saints. They evolved into festivals of singing,
dancing and drinking, but sources of parades in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day are hard to find, Meagher wrote.
“It was in the nineteenth century, however, particularly in the 1840s and 1850s, that the commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day began to take on its modern form.” Meagher wrote.
The early parade days
The St. Patrick's Day parade tradition was born in New Haven March 17, 1842, when about 90 members of the Hibernia Provident Society marched through the city behind a specially made banner to commemorate the saint’s feast day.
The first marchers stepped off from the corner of Chapel and State streets around 9 a.m. led by the New Haven Blues band and proceeded through Chapel and York streets to Christ’s Church for Mass, according to “Wearin’ O’ the Green: St. Patrick’s Day in Connecticut 1842-1992” by Neil Hogan.
“My thought is (the parade) was the Irish saying we’re here and we’re gonna stay,” said Hogan, who is also editor for The Connecticut Irish American Historical Society newsletter Shanachie. “(Irish people) weren’t accepted in Connecticut especially. They wanted to tell the Connecticut people they’re here to stay and they aren’t really monsters and aren’t ugly and stupid and things like that. So that’s why I think they started a parade. New York had started a parade for some years, so they had an example nearby.”
In the early years of the parade, only a small population of Irish lived in New Haven, maybe 70 to 80 families, Hogan said and “they were at the bottom of the ladder as far as jobs.” They were canal builders on the Farmington Canal, worked in the harbor and had other tough jobs, settling initially in the Wooster Square neighborhood. They were also mainly Catholics coming into a very Protestant oriented society that came down from the Puritans, Hogan said.
The parade was essentially a way “to fight the anti-Irish sentiment and bias that the Irish faced, a way to solidify the Irish and ensure they had a voice,” said longtime New Haven resident and St. Patrick’s Day parade observer, attorney Hugh Keefe, whose parents immigrated to Boston from County Kerry, Ireland. “There’s a lot of history wrapped up in the parade.”
“They weren’t very well accepted,” Hogan said. “Wooster Square was off away from the city. They had a tough time economically, trying to make a living. They weren’t well accepted. They had no say in city government for a number of years. The parade was something they could say this is who we are and we march and we’re proud of Ireland.”
Throughout the history of the parade, the Irish community in New Haven always felt the effects of the events of their homeland of Ireland. Soon after the birth of the parade, Ireland suffered from a massive failure of the potato crop know as the Great Hunger or Great Famine, which killed millions and forced many to leave the country. It was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1849.
The New Haven Irish community continued celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a public parade, “meanwhile, Ireland stood on the brink of disaster,” the Columbian Register reported in 1846. It was the next year that instead of holding a parade, the Hibernia Provident Society collected $300 and donated it to the relief effort.
Paradeless years
While 2018 marks 176 years from the creation of the New Haven parade, the event can only claim 100 parades held. For nearly half a century, the New Haven community saw no parade in their city.
“There were certain periods of history where it didn’t make sense to have a parade,” 2018 parade Grand Marshal Patrick Smith said. The paradeless years saw much turmoil in Ireland and two world wars.
In 1877, the Irish societies heard addresses by local reverends “in favor of abandoning the parade the customary parade on St. Patrick’s Day, that the money used for bands, entertainment, hall hire, etc. might go to the destitute of the city,” the Register reported. While a parade went on that year, from 1878 to 1955, with a few exceptions, New Haven saw no demonstration of a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Even without parades, St. Patrick’s Day was still celebrated in the city. More than saints important to other cultures, St. Patrick is prominent in Irish Catholic culture, Hogan said.
“They came here and didn’t have many heroes. The English had seen to that,” Hogan said. “They kept them down for centuries. The English said terrible things about the Irish and the Irish had no chance for people to come up and be great musicians, or politicians. In anything, they could never get ahead. And for them, St. Patrick made up for all that they didn’t have.”
The modern parade
“New Haven’s St. Patrick’s Day parade is a precious keepsake that has been made even more precious because, having been given up for lost, it was rediscovered and revived,” wrote the authors of “Images of America: New Haven’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade” Joan Moynihan and Neil Hogan.
After many long years with no parade in the city, it was finally reborn in 1956, with the announcement coming in the morning edition of the Register Jan. 29 saying “New Haven’s Irishmen are going to have their own St. Patrick’s Day parade after a lapse of nearly half a century. Plans now being readied call for a big-scale celebration with scores of units and thousands of people participating in the tribute to the Emerald Isles’ patron saint.”
The Ancient Order of Hibernians sponsored the event on March 17 with William F. Gallogly Sr., who was a native of County Leitrim and came to New Haven in 1922, serving as chairman. Weather threatened the festivities, though, and the day before the parade, the city was hit with the worst snowstorm seen in eight years, with snowfall totaling 81⁄2 inches.
“Amid the chaos, the parade committeemen who had been planning the event for several years pondered whether to throw up their hands in despair or go forward with the event,” Hogan wrote in “Wearin’ O’ the Green.”
But the city was determined to revive the parade that year so Mayor Richard C. Lee assembled a fleet of 21 snowplows and 14 salt and sand trucks, more than 100 workers, to toil through the night clearing the streets. Their effort wasn’t in vain, since shortly after 2 p.m., the grand marshal stepped off from Whalley Avenue and Carmel Street to lead marchers past 45,000 spectators.
The Journal Courier wrote in an editorial: “It’s a great day for the Irish and for the rest of us — for when an Irishman’s happy, everybody’s happy. .. After a long lapse, the sons of the Gael and all their friends are about to honor St. Patrick with marching and music. From all parts of the state and beyond, they’re coming and they’re here. And even the green stripe on Fifth Avenue can hardly hope to see a heartier or happier celebration than New Haven’s own today.”
A true sea of green and tradition
The display in ‘56 was practically the same as what is put on 62 years later, except that it’s grown to become the largest single-day spectator event in the state and one of the oldest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the country. The modern parade boasts 150 marching units, which can total upwards of 2,000 marchers, and some 300,000 spectators line the parade route every year.
“There’s a religious component that means a lot to a lot of people every year, and a lot of people march in honor of St. Patrick, the patron saint,” Keefe said. “There’s a social component, too, that’s at least as big as the religious one, and the reason the immigrants march. You go out to New Haven and see people you haven’t seen all year. It’s a wonderful occasion.”
The 2018 grand marshal, Patrick Smith, grew up just a few blocks from the parade’s finish on Grove and Orange streets. His parents would take him every year to the corner where marchers conclude the parade. He loved watching the police and fire units, the bands and Shriners riding around on mini bikes.
“When you’re a little kid it’s the coolest thing,” Smith said. “You wouldn’t miss it. Every year it was marked on your calendar.”
As an adult, Smith said the day isn’t only about the parade, but also gets recognized as an unofficial start of spring and the warm weather to come.
Smith said tradition keeps it going. “I see the same people, those I went to kindergarten with it,” Smith said. “Even if it rains or it’s cold, spring is around the corner. Some people I only see once a year on the parade route. What will keep the parade going are my love and passion for it and that a lot of people share the same sentiments.” He’s hoping to pass those feeling along to his 3-yearold son, Declan, to march alongside his dad.
A few traditions kept from the inaugural parade are the Mass held beforehand at St. Mary’s Church and the wearing of morning-suits by the grand marshal and parade committee, which was common dress of the day in the 1950s for special occasions.
“Up against ‘Irish need not apply,’ the fact they were marching down street was big deal,” 2018 chairwoman Courtney Ludgren Connors said. “Every year we put on the parade we can think of that and be proud all because of what Irish did in the city. That’s the historical significance that you feel. Now to New Haven, it’s a day where they can go out with their family. It’s truly a citywide event that brings everyone together for a good reason.”
As a little girl, Connors watched in delight and awe with her grandmother as her father, a New Haven firefighter, marched every year in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Together, she and her grandmother would wait for the parade queen and her court to ride by and talk one day of Connors holding that honor, a tradition that started with the rebirth of the parade.
Connors didn’t become parade queen, but was named honor attendant in 2007 and this year was chairwoman for the parade, the highest position on the parade committee next to grand marshal. Connors said she still gets chills when she remembers watching her dad walk in the parade and the pride she felt. “It inspired me to be part of why this parade keeps going,” Connors said.
Similarly, Hogan said what’s kept the event going is “the depth of feelings the Irish have for their heritage.”
Under the title of the Associated Irish Societies Inc., the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Knights of St. Patrick, the New Haven Gaelic Football and Hurling Club and the West Haven Irish American Club sponsor the parade each year. And the $120,000 that is needed comes solely from donations and sponsorships, Connors said. This year the committee held 15 fundraisers that “run the gambit” of events, including a golf tournament, 5K race and trivia nights.
“It’s a fun thing, but I take away the feeling of I’m part of something good in American life and my people from Ireland built that part of American life,” Hogan said.
“For me, it’s a way I can honor my heritage and my family’s strong Irish background by putting our best foot forward on that day,” said Cliff Lynch, a former parade grand marshal with Irish roots going back to the mid-1800s in this country when the Lynches emigrated from Cork, Ireland. “It’s a little connection to your past, to your heritage, to where your family came from ... and ultimately showing where we, as Irish Americans, are going in the future, improving on ourselves, on our families and trying to make the best for everybody.”
A multicultural event
It’s not only Irish organizations and groups that march in the parade anymore and not only Irish Catholics who enjoy the festivities. A host of cultural groups, military, police and fire units, fife and drum and bagpipe groups, along dance teams school groups and marching bands that practice for weeks all make up the parade. And one can expect every type of person to be in attendance.
“It’s not just about Irish culture,” Smith said. “It’s just about culture and tradition. It’s diverse, celebrating everything the city has to offer and becoming more of family event each year. It reflects the city’s culture and population as it should.”
“Walking down parade, it’s not just Irish people, it’s collective people,” Connors said. “Although we’re celebrating St. Patrick, our marching is a celebration of everything around us.”