158-Year-Old Irish Boyfriend

A hundred and fifty-eight year-old drummer boy of the famous Irish Brigade may soon come back to life on the silver screen as the boyfriend of a present day teenage girl. Of course, he was only fifteen when he died at the Battle of Antietam, so the match isn’t so bad. That’s the plot of a contest winning screen play by a New Yorker now living in West Virginia. Robert Savage’s script is a modern day horror story, set in Sharpsburg, MD, site of the September 17, 1862 battle. His story won the Anything But Hollywood screenplay contest.That the fictional drummer boy would have died that day is not surprising. It was the single bloodiest day in US military history, and Savage placed him in the 69th NY Volunteer regiment of the Irish Brigade, who attacked the infamous “Bloody Lane” that day.You can read more about the screen play HERE.

This week in the history of the Irish

On January 30, 1879, Edme Patrice de MacMahon retired as president of France. MacMahon's ancestors had immigrated to France from Torrodile, County Limerick, in 1691, after the family's support of King James. His father, Maurice Francis, was a soldier in the French army. In 1790 Maurice's royalist politics nearly caused his head to become separated from his body, but he managed to survive until the Bourbon restoration. Read more about him HERE.