Starting this fall, “What’s the Craic?” will become a regular feature of this website. It may contain our thoughts on a current topic, some discovery we make, comments we receive from Trail visitors and more. We look forward to finding out where “the craic” will lead. Until the fall we leave you with some connections we discovered during our investigations.
“I love those connections that make this big old world feel like a little village.” -Gina Bellman
We discovered many connections when developing the Trail. Some were expected such as the Dublin Street or Little Dublin showing the Irish settled in the same area of a town. We wonder whether they knew each other from home – or maybe it was enough that they were Irish.
But other questions were unusual and seemingly coincidental. For instance Bishop Cheverus who said the first mass in Plymouth stopped in Scituate on his way back to Boston to say mass there.
Maurice Tobin, Mayor of Boston, Governor of Massachusetts, and United States Secretary of Labor summered in Scituate. He was in attendance at the Centenary Commemoration of the Brig Saint John Shipwreck in Cohasset along with James Michael Curley another Scituate Summer resident and then Mayor of Boston.
John Boyle O’Reilly, Poet, Patriot, and Editor of the Pilot was so esteemed that he was invited to write and recite a poem at the Dedication of the Monument to the Pilgrim Fathers, August 1,1889. O’Reilly’s summer home is currently the Hull Public Library.
So we connect the dots – Plymouth to Scituate, Scituate to Cohasset, Hull to Plymouth. These connections almost foreshadow the beginnings of the South Shore Irish Heritage Trail.