Savannah’s annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration is the 2nd largest in the nation, and city officials say they expect this year’s edition – the 202nd – to be the biggest yet. But how did a coastal Georgia city become one of the biggest supporters of Irish heritage? Irish settlers first arrived in Savannah all the way back in 1734 when at least nine of the first Georgia colonists granted land were Irish. But those early days were tough – Savannah’s original charter prevented Roman Catholics from owning land, as the English Trustees feared they would be amenable to Spanish encroachment from Florida. Those fears died down after the Revolutionary War and the real rush started a century later in the 1840s, when a tragic potato famine struck Ireland and refugees fled the Emerald Isle by the thousands. Researchers say that by the 1860s one in three white households in Savannah were made up of Irish-born immigrants where they worked in the city’s booming shipping, agricultural and railroad industries. Today their heritage and history are celebrated on St. Patrick’s Day, which of course kicks off with an early morning mass at the historic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
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