New York's First St. Patrick's Day Feast

New York's earliest documented St. Patrick's Day observance was not a parade. It was a dinner invitation, printed as a small notice in the New York Mercury on March 15, 1762, inviting any interested gentleman to a St. Patrick's feast two days later at the house of John Marshall, near a spot then called Mount Pleasant, close to the city's college. New York was still a British colonial port at the time, fourteen years before American independence, and its Irish community included both merchants and men serving the Crown. The paper trail goes quiet on public marching until 1766, when the newspapers describe the day being ushered in on the street at dawn with fifes and drums. By decade's end, an Irish fraternal order embedded in the British Army's 16th Regiment of Foot was holding its own St. Patrick's dinners in the city, the clearest documented tie between the holiday and the soldiers who get the credit for it today.