Savannah plans a supersized 200th anniversary celebration of its beloved St. Patrick’s Day parade

SAVANNAH, Ga. — There was no green beer, no pickup trucks with parade floats or throngs of tourists in flashy green outfits. Instead, just a few dozen early Irish immigrants from Savannah marched a half-mile from a riverfront hotel to attend a special service at what was then the city’s only Roman Catholic church.

That modest procession on March 17, 1824 launched one of Savannah’s most beloved – and profitable – traditions. On Saturday, Georgia’s oldest city will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which over time has grown into one of the largest in America. Thousands of revelers are expected to fill the sidewalks and plazas along the parade route through historic downtown Savannah.

More than 18,000 hotel rooms in Savannah and surrounding Chatham County are nearly sold out this weekend. The parade line-up is packed with at least 230 pipe-and-drum bands, chauffeured dignitaries, marching military units and shamrock-decorated floats. Downtown bars have stocked up on extra kegs of beer and the city has rented more than 320 portable toilets for those who imbibe.

“We expect historic crowds of visitors and residents alike,” said Jay Melder, Savannah city manager.

Over the past two centuries, St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah has become perhaps the South’s largest street celebration, standing between New Orleans’ Mardi Gras and Florida’s raucous spring break.

It’s a far cry from how Savannah’s party started.

The Hibernian Society of Savannah, founded as a nondenominational charity to help poor Irish immigrants, had an important day planned for March 17, 1824. The group invited Bishop John England, an Irish native appointed to head the newly formed Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina. to come to Savannah and speak at the city’s Roman Catholic Church.

The Hibernians hosted England on St. Patrick’s Day in their morning meeting at the City Hotel near the bluff overlooking the Savannah River. They then marched in procession, accompanied by a band and a standard bearer whose standard was decorated with a symbolic Irish harp and shamrocks, to hear the bishop speak at St. John the Baptist Church in the afternoon.

“May Savannah’s example have a broad influence,” the bishop told an audience of both Catholics and Protestants in the crowded church, as a crowd of onlookers stood outside in the rain, the Republican newspaper Savannah reported. “Here men who differ in religion can meet as friends and brothers.”

Then the Irish society marched back to the hotel, where the bishop joined about 80 members for an evening banquet marked by a steady stream of toasts, said Howard Keeley, director of the Center for Irish Research and Teaching at Georgia Southern University.

“They apparently partied all night,” said Keeley, who studies the history of Irish immigrants in Georgia. “It was a big party. The Hibernians had always held these celebrations since their founding in 1812. This was only enhanced by the bishop’s presence.”

Like even older St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and Boston, Savannah’s parade is likely rooted in military units that celebrated the holiday during the American Revolution, Keeley said. He noted that there are stories of Irish-born soldiers marching on St. Patrick’s Day while serving under George Washington.

The celebration of Savannah grew along with the Irish population. Workers from Ireland settled in the southern port city in the 1830s to help build railways and canals. In the 1840s, the potato famine in Ireland drove as many as two million immigrants to American shores, doubling Savannah’s Irish-born population, Keeley said.

In the decades following the Civil War, Savannah’s holiday began to offer glimpses of the more commercially driven celebrations to come.

Local clothing stores stocked green ties and gloves in 1875, according to “The Days We’ve Celebration,” a history of St. Patrick’s Day festivities in Savannah by the late William L. Fogarty, who served as the parade’s grand marshal in 1986 .

And after the 1888 celebration, a newspaper reported that Savannah officials had ordered businesses to close for the day because “the city is in commotion with Sunday cocktails.”

Even in the 1960s, Savannah’s parade had not yet become a real tourist dynamo.

Tim Mahoney, chairman of the parade organizing committee, recalled that when his father held the same position in 1969, the parade was planned “on someone’s dinner table” and was composed of high school bands, locally based military units and the Irish families of Savannah. .

“They had no money; they had no resources,” Mahoney said. “But in true Irish leadership fashion, they just rolled up their sleeves and said, ‘Oh well, we’re going to make this parade happen.’”

While some may call this year’s celebration Savannah’s 200th parade, that is incorrect. The coronavirus pandemic caused City Hall to cancel the St. Patrick’s Day parades in 2020 and 2021, and there were several previous years when Savannah went without a parade — including during the Civil War, World War I and the Irish Revolution in 1921 .

The 200th anniversary parade will be held a day early Saturday, in keeping with another long-standing Savannah tradition. When the March 17 holiday falls on a Sunday, organizers will move the parade to Saturday to avoid disrupting church services.

Officials expect visitors to arrive even earlier and start celebrating in earnest on Thursday. They will find park fountains flowing with green-dyed water. Several buildings in the center, including the town hall and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, temporarily glow green at night thanks to special lighting.

What would the ancestors think of Savannah’s celebration?

“They would be blown away,” Mahoney said.