In 1910 the luck of the Irish visited Brattleboro’s Harriet Howard. Twenty two years earlier she had moved to town with her husband. He was a dairy farmer and she was a seamstress.
According to a local newspaper article, Harriet surprisingly received a letter from a Dublin, Ireland lawyer and was told she had inherited one million dollars from her dearly departed grandmother.
Harriet was astonished. Her father had left Ireland and settled in Nova Scotia many years before her birth. She had never met her grandmother and was not aware that her grandparents had invested in Irish real estate.
The Brattleboro Reformer published an article on the front page of the paper explaining Harriet’s good fortune. The article stated that Harriet would be traveling to Ireland to collect her unexpected inheritance later in the summer.
Also on the front page of the March 18, 1910 paper was a report on the St. Patrick’s Day Fair held at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic parish. The Fair was an annual event where parish women decorated Festival Hall in green shamrocks, set up various booths to celebrate Ireland’s patron saint and sold sweets, flowers, ice cream and beverages. A program of music, dance and song was presented to the audience from church members and students of St. Michael’s School. Amid the food, dance and musical celebration of Irish heritage, the senior class sang the battle song “O’Donnell Aboo”.
The song was written in the 1840’s and it tells the story of the first time the Irish united together to fight against the invading British in the late 1590’s. Aboo is Gaelic for “to victory” and the chorus of the song cheers the O’Donnell clan on as they prepare to battle the British.
On the one hand, the battle song seems out of place for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration organized by the parish women of St. Michael’s and sung by the senior class of the Catholic school. The final line of the chorus is “make the proud Saxon feel, Erin’s avenging steel! Strike for your country! O’Donnell Aboo!”
On the other hand, six years later, in 1916, Ireland’s Easter Uprising began as the Irish once again fought to free themselves from English rule. Maybe the St. Michael’s seniors had it right when they sang the battle song harkening back to the days of conflict with the British.
Patrick Pearse, one of the Easter Rising ringleaders, taught school less than 2 kilometers from the Dublin property inherited by Brattleboro’s Harriet Howard.