Boyos but no green beer in 1839

One hundred eighty years ago this weekend, “a number of gentlemen” assembled in a Downtown hotel to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

They sat down “about half past seven o’clock” on March 16 “to a most sumptuous supper . . . liberally supplied with every delicacy the season could afford . . . and the wines were selected with a judgment and taste alike.”

That’s how The Allegheny Democrat reported it March 28, 1839, anyway. The hotel, the Dravo House, would be lost six years later in the Great Pittsburgh Fire of April 10, 1845, which took a third of the city and twothirds of its wealth (and would be blamed by some on an Irish washerwoman’s tub-heating fire gone awry). That fire came the same year the Irish Potato Famine began.

The Great Hunger brought a million deaths by starvation in Ireland. Another million fled the island in ships. But the start of that Irish diaspora was still six years off when these Pittsburgh men met. All they wanted to do that Saturday night was raise glasses to St. Patrick, their ancestral homeland and their adopted country.

So with thanks to John Canning of the Allegheny City Society for sharing this very old newspaper story, let’s see how a Paddy’s Day celebration in an early Pittsburgh hotel differed from the raucous, sprawling party that crosses rivers today. (I’m writing this Friday, but I’m trusting that tradition held.)

The first thing that strikes anyone eyeing this account is the sheer number of toasts. The story that stretches across three newspaper columns is almost entirely a word-by-word account of the proclamations. Dennis Roddy, former PostGazette columnist, allaround troublemaker and devotee of Irish history, counted 13 “Regular Toasts’’ and 27 “Volunteer Toasts” in the story.

Mr. Roddy was struck by the expansiveness of the ritual. “While there is no way of knowing whether each toast occasioned a sip from the same glass over a period of time, it is notable that the more belligerent ones about Irish freedom and the evils of Britain seem to come after the first 13.”

Indeed, early on, the toasts were to the saint, the old country, the new one, the memory of George Washington, and their adopted city: “Pittsburgh — Her great natural resources, her commerce and her manufactures, developed by the intelligence, enterprise and industry of her citizens combine to make her the first inland city of the union.”

The formality is striking. Jim Lamb, honorary consul of the Republic of Ireland for Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia and president of the Ireland Institute of Pittsburgh, said there remains a core group of friends of Ireland not dissimilar to these old boys. They keep up with the old country via the BBC, The Irish Times and other media, and continue to advocate for self-determination and laud some of the same Irish heroes. But they’re not that formal.

Rob Tierney, a Dublin native and vice president of the Institute, wondered what these dignified men would think of the “Drink Till You’re Irish” T-shirt brigade, as people of every ethnicity claim this day to party. (And come Cinco de Mayo, they’ll be back in different outfits.)

Mr. Tierney liked their toast to “Universal Education — the forerunner of universal liberty,’’ and wished people still saw that tie as clearly.

Sarah McAuliffe Bellin, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Irish American Unity Conference and grand marshal of the 2016 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, was struck as others were by toasts criticizing Daniel O’Connell. Known as “The Liberator,” Mr. O’Connell had led the movement that forced the British to pass the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and allow Catholics in the House of Commons.

But Mr. O’Connell was also a loud critic of American slavery. “Of all men living,” he’d said in 1829, “an American citizen, who is the owner of slaves, is the most despicable.” So while a Pittsburgher named A. Murphy toasted him without reservation, there was a Regular Toast critiquing Mr. O’Connell’s “animadversions’’ on American institutions. John Andoe toasted “Daniel O’Connell — His countrymen disclaim and repudiate the sentiments he has expressed derogatory to the National character of America.’’

Ms. Bellin noted that six years after this evening of toasts, Mr. O’Connell welcomed Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist, to Ireland. Mr. Douglass, touring during the start of the famine, wrote home to say he’d “found much here to remind me of my former condition.” But Pittsburghers of 1839 wanted Mr. O’Connell “to mind his own business,” failing to see the commonality of oppression, she said.

And speaking of oppression.

“Where were the women?’’ she asked. “Doing the hard work, I’m sure, and not drinking with the boyos at the club.”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone.