Drive south out of Boston, past the Fore River and over the line into Norfolk County, and you reach a town that wears its heritage on its sleeve and over its bar. The Irish in Weymouth are not a footnote to the place. By the most generous count, roughly four in ten residents trace their roots to Ireland, a share that puts this old shipbuilding town near the very top of the most Irish places in Massachusetts. To understand Weymouth today is to understand a particular Boston story: families who left the city for the South Shore and never looked back.
The Place
Weymouth sits on the South Shore of Massachusetts, where the Fore River and the Back River drain into Hingham Bay and the wider Massachusetts Bay. It is one of the oldest settlements in the country. Founded in 1622 as the Wessagusset colony, just two years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, it is reckoned the second-oldest township in the Commonwealth.
Unlike Plymouth, Weymouth was not born of religious idealism. It was a commercial venture, a place built to make money from fish and trade. The town was renamed Weymouth in 1635, after the English port from which a hundred new settlers had sailed.
Today it is a town of roughly 57,000 people, split into four villages with strong local identities: North Weymouth, South Weymouth, East Weymouth and Weymouth Landing, the last of which presses up against neighbouring Braintree.
How It Became Irish
The Irish story in Weymouth is really two stories. There is the older one, of labourers and parishioners who arrived in the nineteenth century. And there is the larger, more recent one, of Boston families who moved out to the suburbs after the Second World War and brought the city’s Irish character with them.
The first arrivals
Irish people had been present on the South Shore for a very long time before they came in numbers. The South Shore Irish Heritage Trail traces documented Irish presence in the region back to the 1600s, including survivors of the 1626 wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk who found refuge in Plymouth.
The great change came with the Famine. Between the 1840s and the Civil War, the Irish made up roughly a third of all immigrants arriving in the United States, and at the height of the Famine emigration close to half. Many landed in Boston and fanned out to find work. On the South Shore they found it: in the seaweed beds of Scituate, in the building trades, and in towns like Weymouth where industry was growing.
Weymouth had work to offer. The town was deep in the shoemaking trade from the early eighteenth century, an industry that ran right through to 1973, when the Stetson Shoe Company finally closed. There were iron works, fed by local bog iron discovered in 1771, and there was shipbuilding along the Fore River. These were the kinds of jobs that drew Irish hands.
The parishes take root
As the Catholic population grew, the parishes followed, and those parishes became the spine of Irish community life. The Archdiocese of Boston planted churches across the town’s villages. In North Weymouth, what would become Saint Jerome Parish began as a small wooden chapel that filled so quickly that worshippers stood outside, listening to Mass through the open windows.
The old Saint Jerome church burned down on Palm Sunday in 1914. Parishioners crossed over to Immaculate Conception in East Weymouth until a second Saint Jerome church was blessed on the 29th of August 1915. In 1928 Saint Jerome was made a parish in its own right, and the Reverend Charles A. O’Brien, a name that tells its own story, was appointed its first pastor.
These were not merely places of worship. The parish school, the parish hall and the parish societies organised social life for generations of Irish Weymouth families, much as they did for the Irish in nearby Milton and across the harbour in South Boston.
The great suburban migration
The defining wave came after 1945. Through the late 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, Boston’s Irish families began leaving the old city neighbourhoods for the South Shore. People who had grown up in Dorchester and Hyde Park bought homes in Quincy, then Weymouth, then further down the coast.
Many of them already knew the South Shore as a summer place. The shore towns had long been a holiday escape for working Boston families, which is how the stretch from Weymouth down to Kingston earned its enduring nickname, the Irish Riviera. Children who had spent summers near the water came back as adults to live there year round.
The movement accelerated sharply in the 1960s and 1970s, during the bitter years of court-ordered school desegregation in Boston. Thousands of white Bostonians, a great many of them of Irish descent, moved out to working and middle-class suburbs, and Weymouth and Quincy were chief among the destinations. What had been a city’s Irish character was, in a generation, transplanted to the towns just south of it.
This is the migration that made modern Weymouth. It is also why the town shares so much DNA with its neighbours: the same parishes, the same surnames, the same pubs, the same accents carried out from the city. The pattern echoes the way other Boston-area communities reshaped their suburbs, from the French Canadians who built Lowell’s mill wards to the more recent arrival of the Chinese community in Quincy next door.
The Landmarks
Saint Jerome Parish, 632 Bridge Street, North Weymouth. The parish that rose, burned and rose again on the Weymouth Neck. From its first crowded wooden chapel to the church blessed in 1915, Saint Jerome has anchored Irish Catholic life in North Weymouth for more than a century, and remains part of the Catholic Weymouth collaborative today.
Immaculate Conception, 720 Broad Street, East Weymouth. The East Weymouth parish that took in Saint Jerome’s worshippers after the 1914 fire. Today it forms the other half of the Catholic Weymouth collaborative, a reminder of how closely the town’s parishes have always leaned on one another.
The Cottage Bar, 26 Union Street, Columbian Square. Set up by four friends from Ireland who wanted a good, old-fashioned neighbourhood Irish bar, The Cottage has become a fixture of the Columbian Square corner of South Weymouth. The kitchen serves the kind of homemade food you would find in restaurants back in Ireland, and the weekend brings live music and traditional sessions.
McSwiggan’s Pub, 450 Washington Street. Opened in August 2022 by two owners from County Mayo, McSwiggan’s is the newer face of Irish Weymouth, an authentic pub with modern American touches. That a fresh Mayo-run bar could open and thrive here, eighty years after the suburban exodus began, says something about how deep the roots run.
The Red Rose, East Weymouth. A cosy, unpretentious East Weymouth pub with live music and a loyal local following. It is the sort of neighbourhood room where the singing starts late and everyone seems to know everyone, the everyday infrastructure of an Irish town.
Weymouth Landing. The village on the Braintree line, clustered around the old commercial centre where the Fore River reaches up toward Braintree. It is the gateway between Weymouth and its equally Irish neighbour, and a good place to feel how seamlessly the South Shore’s Irish towns run into one another.
The Fore River and shipyard shore. The working waterway that gave Weymouth men jobs in shipbuilding and gave the town its industrial backbone. The river divides Weymouth from Quincy, the two most-Irish towns on this stretch of coast facing each other across the water.
Where They Came From
The Irish who shaped Weymouth came in two directions. The first generations came directly from Ireland, driven out by the Famine and the long agricultural hardship that followed it, part of the roughly four and a half million Irish who crossed to the United States between 1841 and the Second World War.
Specific county origins are hard to pin down for the nineteenth-century arrivals, and where the record is silent it is wiser to leave it so. But the living Irish presence offers a clue: the two owners of McSwiggan’s hail from County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, a county that sent enormous numbers of its people to Massachusetts during and after the Famine.
The second direction was internal. Most of Weymouth’s Irish families did not arrive from Ireland at all, at least not in living memory. They came from Boston, from Dorchester and Hyde Park and the other old Irish quarters of the city, carrying a heritage that had already been a century in the making before it ever reached the South Shore. Weymouth is, in that sense, second-generation Irish ground twice over.
Weymouth Today
Weymouth today is a comfortable, settled South Shore suburb of around 57,000 people. The Naval Air Station that once dominated South Weymouth was decommissioned in 1997 and is being slowly redeveloped, and the old shoe factories are long gone. But the Irish character that the postwar migration laid down has proved remarkably durable.
By the U.S. Census figures reported by the Boston Globe in 2017, Weymouth ranked among the ten most Irish towns in Massachusetts, with close to four in ten residents claiming Irish ancestry. Eight of the state’s ten most Irish communities sit on the South Shore, and Weymouth marks the northern edge of that band. Whichever exact figure one trusts, the conclusion is the same: few places in America are more Irish than this.
You can still read that heritage in the everyday life of the town: in the parishes that remain active, in the pubs that fill on weekend nights, in the surnames on the school rosters and the youth hockey teams. New arrivals have changed Weymouth too, and the town is more mixed than it once was. But the Irish thread runs through it as plainly as the Fore River runs to the sea, and like the Irish in Hingham and Quincy just along the coast, it shows no sign of fading.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Irish is Weymouth, Massachusetts?
Very. Depending on which Census figures you use, between roughly a third and four in ten Weymouth residents report Irish ancestry. The Irish in Weymouth place the town among the ten most Irish communities in Massachusetts, and on the northern edge of the South Shore’s so-called Irish Riviera.
Why did so many Irish families move to Weymouth?
Most came not directly from Ireland but from Boston. After the Second World War, and especially during the 1960s and 1970s, Irish-American families left city neighbourhoods like Dorchester and Hyde Park for South Shore suburbs such as Weymouth and Quincy, often returning to towns they had known as summer destinations.
What is the “Irish Riviera”?
It is the long-standing nickname for the South Shore of Massachusetts, the coastal stretch running roughly from Weymouth down to Kingston. The name reflects both the area’s heavy Irish-American population and its history as a summer escape for working Boston families.
Are there Irish pubs in Weymouth?
Yes. The Cottage Bar in Columbian Square was founded by four friends from Ireland, and McSwiggan’s on Washington Street was opened in 2022 by two owners from County Mayo. The Red Rose in East Weymouth is another well-loved neighbourhood spot with live music.
What are the main Catholic parishes serving Irish Weymouth?
Saint Jerome in North Weymouth and Immaculate Conception in East Weymouth, which today form the Catholic Weymouth collaborative. Saint Jerome grew from a small chapel, survived a fire in 1914, and became a parish in its own right in 1928 under its first pastor, the Reverend Charles A. O’Brien.
How old is the town of Weymouth?
Weymouth was founded in 1622 as the Wessagusset colony, just two years after the Pilgrims settled Plymouth, which makes it the second-oldest township in Massachusetts. It was renamed Weymouth in 1635 after the English port that sent a hundred new settlers.
If your family’s story passed through Weymouth, or any of the places Irish families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Famine-era croft in County Mayo to a triple-decker in Dorchester, to a house on the South Shore, to wherever you are now.