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For 150 years, New Haven, Connecticut, has truly been a new haven for emigrants. Its first refugees were its Puritan founders who sought to build a godly city and a thriving seaport around the beautiful harbor at Quinnipiac, as the Native Americans called the place.
To this colonial seaport there came, too, an occasional German doctor, French or Irish sea captain, Jewish or Italian merchant and many African American men and women brought in bondage. Later still New Haven became a bustling manufacturing and transportation hub where wave upon wave of immigrants from the four corners of the earth, all seeking the same things - political and religious freedom and economic opportunity. By the middle of the 19th century, about a quarter of the city's population was foreign-born and by 1930, 70% of its people were either emigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.
Many of these immigrants came from Ireland. The principal folk festival of New Haven's Irish, the celebration of St. Patrick's Day, began in 1842. This book is an informal Chronicle of the lives and times of New Haven's Irish people, a history of their causes and concerns, and their hopes and fears, their triumphs and failures. It makes no pretense of being a deeply penetrating historical or sociological study of the Saint Patrick's Day phenomenon in America nor even in New Haven. That we leave to professional scholars with the consoling thought that deep, penetrating historical and sociological studies not infrequently ignore what is most important - the words and deeds of everyday people who make history.
includes postage and handling
CT Irish-American Historical Society
c/o Mary McMahon
640 Arrowhead Drive
Orange, CT 06477
CT Irish-American
Heritage Trail
640 Arrowhead Drive
Orange, CT 06477
The Irish experience has had a profound impact on Connecticut's past, and its narrative spans all periods of the state's history and touches every one of its eight counties and 169 towns.
