Dorchester Heights: How South Boston Won a High School and Boston Got a Holiday

In the 1890s, the working-class Irish American families of South Boston wanted what other neighborhoods had: a high school of their own. The city chose the cheapest site it owned, an old reservoir on Telegraph Hill. But that hill was Dorchester Heights, fortified by George Washington's army during the Siege of Boston — and Boston's Protestant elite objected. The fight ended in a compromise that gave South Boston its school and Boston a new holiday.

A new neighborhood

Boston annexed the Dorchester Peninsula from the then-separate town of Dorchester in 1804, and within decades it grew into South Boston. Irish Catholics were the largest immigrant group to reach Boston in the 1800s, and South Boston became a predominantly Irish American enclave.

Boston in 1776, with the Dorchester Peninsula. Credit: Digital Commonwealth.

Telegraph Hill, South Boston's tallest, had been fortified during the Siege of Boston in 1775–1776 and again in the War of 1812; traces of those works still showed when the city built a reservoir there in the 1850s for its new public water system. Thomas Park shared the hill, and as development filled the neighborhood, it became the only open space residents had.

The fight for a school

Until the 1890s, South Boston students had to travel elsewhere in the city for high school. Residents used their growing influence in a city government increasingly led by Irish Americans, and held public forums. "It is our right to have our children educated here if we want them to be," one resident, Charles M. Bromwich, said in 1894.

The city agreed, but land was expensive. Rather than use eminent domain or buy property, it offered the reservoir site, which it already owned and no longer needed. Many residents would have preferred a flatter, more central spot, but accepted the hill to finally get their school.

History versus a schoolhouse

Beyond South Boston, the choice was controversial. Boston's Protestant elite felt the newer Irish Catholic residents did not appreciate Dorchester Heights' place in the Revolution. "With a high school on the reservoir lot historical Dorchester Heights would be no more," said Representative John J. Toomey. William S. McNary argued the heights should be preserved as a patriotic lesson and for the fresh air they gave the poor.

The compromise

South Boston got its high school on one side of the hill; the other side got a monument tower to Dorchester Heights and the Revolution. The city created a new holiday, Evacuation Day, on March 17, to mark the British evacuation of Boston. South Boston embraced it, combining it with its St. Patrick's Day celebration in a parade up to the monument. South Boston High School opened to great fanfare in 1901. In the 1970s it became a focal point of the violent protests over the desegregation of Boston's public schools.

Sources

Based on "Transforming Telegraph Hill and Remembering Dorchester Heights," from the National Park Service series Desegregation in the Cradle of Liberty, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from The Boston Globe, 1894 and 1897.