What's Up With Evacuation Day, Anyway?

Walking to work today, Bostonist saw two people a day early in their full-out St. Patrick's Day Irish gear (green paper hat, "all about drinking and Irishness in a hard-drinking, heavily Irish town. But part of us clings to the belief that if people only knew more about Evacuation Day - commemorating an actual Revolutionary War victory in Boston (unlike Bunker Hill Day) - they would embrace it as we do. To that end, some history:

So Washington and his rag-tag band of soldiers had the city of Boston under siege during the winter of 1775-76. Boston was gated then (on the corner of Washington Street and East Berkeley in the South End, you can see a marker on the Ming's Market building, showing where gates once stood), and Washington et al. couldn't just go charging in. Luckily, Henry Knox (after whom the famous fort would later be named; that's his tubby face, above) led a daring and clever mission that winter to schlep some big-ass cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York back to Boston.

Washington set up the cannon (of which there were 59 - cannon, we have lately learned, is a word to which one does not append an "s" even when it's plural) on Dorchester Heights in South Boston. From there, he could easily pummel the hated redcoats (this map give a good sense of the troop positions), which they realized after Mr. Dollar Bill sent a few warning shots into the mix. And that was that. The Brits and their loyalists evacuated to Nova Scotia, with Washington promising not to shoot at them in exchange for their promise not to torch the city as they left, and Boston was happily in the hands of the revolutionaries. (A really cool and old-timey first-hand description by one Dr. Thacher, a surgeon in Washington's army, can be found here.)

The bloodless victory was something of a revelation because Boston was much too secure a port to be attacked from the sea and nobody figured the two-bit Americans could manage to take it from the landward side (like the attack Aqaba in Lawrence of Arabia). However, it took the rise of Irish immigrants as a political force in the Commonwealth for the holiday to be proclaimed, in 1901, and officially made a work holiday in Suffolk County, in 1938.