The annual Baltimore St. Patrick's Day Parade is a proud day for the Irish-Americans of Baltimore, and no one will be prouder than Ed Crawford, president, and Terry Brennan, past president, of Division 3 Towson The Ancient Order of Hibernians.
With 125 members, Towson AOH is the largest division in Maryland of the national Irish Catholic men's organizaton. They will walk behind their banner wearing the distinctive top hats and morning suits and carrying irish walking sticks for which they are known.
Joining Brennan, a Realtor with Long & Foster, will be his four sons, now adults, who have walked in the parade with him since they were 4- and 5-years-old.
"They look forward to the parade," said Brennan, a member of Towson AOH since 1986 and who, like Crawford, has been focused on preparing Towson AOH's participation in the parade since January.
Among AOH's missions is to preserve and promote Irish heritage in the United States. The St. Patrick's Day parade is one way Towson AOH accomplishes that goal, but the one people know best.
"The parade is the visual, the public apex, of the Irish-American heritage celebration," said Crawford, calling it a collective effort by many Irish-American groups "to communicate the Irish-American story in America and locally, to build a positive image."
On an ice-encrusted winter day a few weeks before the parade, the two men, both Towson residents, sat over coffee at a local diner and talked about Towson AOH's efforts to that end. It's not as simple as you'd think.
While the days of outright discrimination against the Irish are long gone — the job discrimination, the lower social status, the anti-Catholic sentiment — there is still what Crawford calls "a level of misperception." Interestingly, events like the St. Patrick's Day Parade seem to bring that out.
"We want to stop the defamation of the Irish," said Crawford, a retired banker.
He said along past parade routes, he has seen face masks and T-shirts with slogans equating Irish with drunks that he finds offensive.
He also decries the commercialization of St. Patrick's Day, which is always celebrated on March 17 whatever the date of the parade. The commercialization obscures "the sacrifice and commitment" of the Irish, he said.
"It's not funny hats and T-shirts," he said of the Irish experience in America. "People have forgotten the history of the Irish — how they struggled, the menial jobs and prejudice. We want people to have fun, but not be made fun of."
"We are trying to improve our image," said Brennan, who noted the "great sense of pride" people of Irish heritage feel.
"The Irish immigrants built the tunnels, worked for the railroad. They were the main workforce" of the era, said Brennan, who, like Crawford, can trace his lineage back to the Irish town from which his ancestor came.
For Brennan, it was a grandfather who was born in Derry, Ireland, and came to the U.S. at the age of 22 looking for work. He and the woman he met in Baltimore and then married, had nine children.
Crawford's great-grandfather came to the Baltimore from Tipperary, Ireland, in 1856. His wife and three children came with him, and they had another seven children in Baltimore. He was a ship carpenter.
Both Brennan and Crawford had ancestors who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Brennan said an ancestor on his mother's side was recruited by the Union Army, which paid for his passage from Ireland to the U.S. Crawford had a great-uncle who was conscripted into the Union Army's Maryland Division.
Towson AOH's efforts on behalf of Irish heritage aren't confined to the St. Patrick's Day Parade.
Two years ago, John Schell, a Towson AOH member, led a coalition of Irish-American groups that resulted in the Maryland General Assembly passing a bill that then-Gov.Martin O'Malley signed it into law.
The law declares March as Irish-American Heritage Month and encourages programs and activities to celebrate it, said Schell, a retired federal worker in Parkville, who chairs the Irish-American heritage committees of Towson AOH and Maryland State AOH.
Before 2013, the month of March had the same designation thanks to annual state proclamations. Now, with the law, Schell said, "it allows a more focused effort." He has been contacting public schools and libraries, universities and community colleges about setting up Irish history displays of books, perhaps photographs if they have them, during March.
First Irish immigrant museum
As a result of several fundraisers, Towson AOH's members donate about $7,000 per year to a variety of causes. One of them, and seemingly the most important for heritage awareness, is the Irish Railroad Workers' Museum, at 920 Lemmon St., in Baltimore.
The museum is on Baltimore's southwest side, one of the major neighborhoods for Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century, the heyday of their immigration to Baltimore.
"We were the first Irish immigrant museum in the United States, although they are now all over the United States," said Judge Tom Ward, who, at the behest of neighborhood residents, was instrumental in putting together a group to prevent the city-owned property from being demolished in 1997. Some of Ward's family had lived in the neighborhood.
"Then the idea grew to honor the Irish immigrants who had lived and worked there," Ward said of the museum that opened in 2002.
In a single decade, from 1840 to 1850, 60,000 immigrants came to Baltimore and stayed here, of whom an estimated 90 percent were Irish, according to Ward, now a museum board member.
"It was the time of the Irish famine," he said of the 1845 to 1853 "Great Hunger," when there was no food and no jobs, and the B&O Railroad, in its expansion westward, was advertising in Ireland for workers.
New York City was the major entry port for the Irish during that period. Baltimore and Boston vied for second and third place. Of Baltimore's Irish immigrants, Ward added, "90 percent came from County Mayo" in Ireland.
The museum consists of two adjacent rowhouses built in 1848 for Irish workers on the B&O Railroad, whose headquarters, a block away at 901 W. Pratt Street, is now the site of the B&O Railroad Museum.
One rowhouse serves as the museum with historical artifacts, records and photographs. The other has been restored as a home of the period, to give a sense of what it was like to live there.
The museum attracts visitors of Irish heritage and Irish tourists to Baltimore. Ward said it is not unusual for them to cry as they tour the displays of photographs, documents, period clothes and furniture.
It's also not unusual for them to buy a brick as a donation to the museum and have it inscribed with parent's names, or grandparents, or an Irish family name before the brick is cemented into the sidewalks around the museum. One woman bought 10 bricks, at $100 each, and had a poem inscribed.
"The front sidewalk is filled, the back sidewalk almost filled" with inscribed bricks, said Ward.
"Our museum is an emotional connection with the past, with the Old Country," said Ward. "We're a bridge to the past."
Crawford calls the museum "a central point, a physical place" for visitors and tourists, part of the area's Irish Heritage Walk with guided neighborhood tours.
"The rowhouse rooms are small, 10 feet wide. Imagine raising 10 kids in it," he said. "It's a reminder of what it was like to be an Irish immigrant."