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Canons fired for the first time in 1600 in honor of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Spain’s northernmost colony of Americas, in St. Augustine, Florida.
A year later, on March 17, 1601, people marched through the streets of St. Augustine city and the cannon fired from the fort celebrating the St. Patrick’s Day for the first time with a parade.
Richard Arthur, the real name of St. Patrick, it is documented to have been an Irish soldier serving military campaigns in Malta, Italy, and Flanders, probably to escape the oppressive conditions facing Catholics in Ireland at the time.
The latest documents founded shown that St. Patrick, known as Padre Ricardo Artur, had served the church as the chaplain in San Juan, Puerto Rico, then, in 1597, he moved in St. Augustine right where the first celebration parades have started in his honour.
St. Patrick is credited as the founder of Christianity in Ireland, converting a society practicing a form of Celtic polytheism. He has been generally so regarded ever since, despite evidence of some earlier Christian presence in Ireland.
This first recorded Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations is a testament to the adventurousness of the Irish, as well as the diversity found in colonial America.
However, St. Augustine’s San Patricio parades did not continue. They appear to have died along with Father Arthur, to be revived almost a century later in 1762, in New York City, although the first St. Patrick's Day celebration, without marching, is recorded in Boston, 1737.
Happy St. Patrick's Day
