"Why Should We Care for a Little Trouble or a Walk through the Mud": St. Patrick's and Columbus Day Parades in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1845-1915

Abstract

THE sidewalks of Worcester, Massachusetts, were packed l with people. Hundreds filled the hillside near the courthouse and thousands choked the city's central intersection of Main and Front Streets. Schoolchildren, granted an unofficial holiday by their despairing teachers, lined the roads in front of their schoolhouses, while the mayor and many of the city's officers jostled each other for space on a small reviewing stand in front of City Hall. Even the county's prisoners in the old jail hoisted themselves to their cell windows to peek out onto the crowded streets below. The crowd was a festive and colorful one. Some, who had visited taverns that morning, were shouting. Almost all, the sober and tipsy, had donned the color mandated for the day. Girls wore green ribbons in their hair and men pinned strips of green to their hats and lapels. One old woman dressed in green from head to toe stood all day on Green Street. (Where else would she stand on this day? she asked the reporter who interviewed her.) Where else indeed? For it was March 17th, 1890, St. Patrick's Day, in an American city that boasted more men and women of Irish blood than all but a handfil of cities in Ireland itself. More important for the crowds packing the city's streets, a parade was on the march, snaking its way through the Irish tenement districts of Worcester's east side before stretching down the city's primary thoroughfare, Main Street.