St. Patrick's Day in Melrose

500-504 Main Street is a historic commercial building that is now home to Edward Jones Investments and Jeff Carbone Insurance. Unlikely as it may seem, it was also the site of Melrose’s first St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

There are occasional references to Irish immigrants in Melrose going back to the 18^th century, but only in the years after the Civil War did a community take shape. In the 1870s, a new generation of young Irish people born in America and raised in Melrose began to assert their Irish and Catholic identities. One of them was Patrick J. Murphy, who grew up at 12 Dell Avenue. In 1870, at the age of 19, Murphy organized the first Catholic Sunday School in Melrose, renting space for lessons  at Masonic Hall.

In 1874, he organized the first St. Patrick’s Day celebration at what was then known as Unity Hall; only a few years later, in 1880, would the building’s owner, Joseph Boardman, reconfigure the building in its current retail and residential arrangement. At that first St. Patrick’s Day, Irish young people gathered at Unity Hall to sing Catholic hymns, perform religious plays, and raise money for the poor in a scene that was a far cry from our modern stereotypical green beer-soaked mayhem.

In fact, the very next year the celebration was moved to the new Town Hall, and this time money was raised for uniforms for a new Catholic boys’ alcohol abstinence group, the Loyola Temperance Cadets of Melrose. One of the lieutenants of the new group was John H. Dowd, Murphy’s next-door neighbor at 14 Dell Avenue. Another was John H. Gately from West Wyoming Street. Murphy and Dowd would later move from Melrose; five generations later, the Gatelys are still here, running the funeral home their ancestor founded.

Melrose’s first Catholic chapel, St. Bridget’s, was founded in 1873 on land that is now occupied by 77-83 Dell Avenue, but was not yet granted a full-time priest, relying instead on the itinerant services of Fr. William Fitzpatrick, who was based in Stoneham. In 1891, the cornerstone of a new St. Bridget’s was laid, and in 1894 it opened as a Melrose’s first Catholic parish—but by then, its name had been changed to St. Mary’s