This South Boston map won’t help on St. Patrick's Day

(From the collection of Charles Swift)

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

Long before green beer and fake Irish brogues, March 17 has meant something in South Boston. It was the day in 1776 when the Continental Army sneaked 50 cannons up Dorchester Heights and chased the Red Coats out of Boston without a fight.

That's technically why all city and state offices are closed today in Suffolk County, to remember the Revolution -- not to memorialize an Irish saint. Still some historians question why the city really takes a holiday on March 17.

“It was one of these wink, wink, nudge, nudge things in it was a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in a cloak of historical significance,” said Charles Swift, a historian who is the executive director of the Gibson House Museum in Back Bay. “Also, for Irish politicians, Evacuation Day was a way to tweak the British.”

Swift runs a blog he calls the City Record and, Boston News-Letter, which took the name of a newspaper published in Boston in 1825. On the blog, Swift posted a copy of a Revolutionary era map of South Boston that looks quite different from the site of Sunday’s parade.

Evacuation Day is one of three Revolutionary holidays. Next month, Patriot’s Day will remember the “shot heard round the world” at Old North Bridge in Concord. The last comes in June, when Suffolk County takes another day off for Bunker Hill Day, commemorating the 1775 battle with the British on a hill just north of downtown.

But St. Patrick’s Day -- err, Evacuation Day -- is the one that really makes the cynical snicker.

“People say, ‘Oh, well, they made up a holiday for St. Patrick Day,’” Swift said. “But you have to have to look at it as a piece of Bunker Hill Day and Patriot’s Day.

“It’s just happens that Evacuation Day falls on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a happy coincidence.”

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