Evacuation Day? or St. Patrick's Day?

A great story embraces a brace of holidays treated as one in Greater Boston (officially, only in Suffolk County, Somerville, and Cambridge). It’s about melding Evacuation Day and St. Patrick’s Day.
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Boston’s port was one of the most significant in the colonies in 1776, and very defensible, too. The British had remained there, licking wounds after winning the Battle of Bunker Hill against militia soldiers on June 17, 1775. It was a costly, Pyrrhic victory at best, in which more than 1,500 men died or were wounded, two thirds of them British. Another victory like that, and we’ll be finished, growled Redcoat commander General William Howe.
Howe’s troops were quartered in Boston, then a gated city. Militia survivors of that fight joined George Washington’s Continental Army, formed only three days before, in Cambridge, and subsequently participated in his Siege of Boston. It was a standoff.
A 25-year-old bookseller named Henry Knox proposed, then executed, a tough and daring plan to haul cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The fort fell in the Spring of ‘75 when Ethan Allan and his Green Mountain Boys joined Benedict Arnold to surprise the garrison. So taken unaware were the British that the fort’s commander surrendered with one hand while the other held up his pants.
Knox and his men, suffering the cruelties of a bitterly cold winter, used oxen and sledges to cart 60 tons of artillery over 300 miles of rugged country in less than two months. On March 7, 1776, 59 cannons were dug in on Dorchester Heights, along with logs to give the look of even more guns looming over the British fleet.
...rest of the story
John Carlson [who wrote the above for Wicked Local] is a retired general and a Braintree resident.
Historical notes: The cannon that chased the British out of Boston were dragged overland from New York, finally through Roxbury and down Boston Street in Dorchester, to the heights overlooking Boston and the pasturelands of the Great Neck, now South Boston. Henry Knox, the first U.S. Secretary of War under President Washington, summered in Dorchester in 1784, in a mansion house that is now the site of the Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library.