Editor’s note: This story was first published as part of the BDN’s “Hard Telling Not Knowing” column on April 10, 2024.
Patriot’s Day is celebrated on the third Monday in April by Maine, Massachusetts and a few other states, commemorating the first battles of the American Revolution, a holiday that dates back more than a century.
In reality, however, Patriot’s Day has its origins in a far older and more obscure tradition, dating back to the days of the first European settlers in New England and early Christians in Rome before that.
Before Patriot’s Day was established, much of New England celebrated Fast Days, a day of public fasting and prayer that could be proclaimed on any day of the year by royal or state governors but was most often celebrated in mid- or late April.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which Maine was a part, proclaimed Fast Days as early as 1670, and the province of New Hampshire did the same in 1680. Back then, most colonists held strict Calvinist Protestant religious beliefs, and saw God as giving of both favor and anger. Fast Days were officially sanctioned attempts to appease God’s wrath, and to prevent calamities like crop failure, disease or natural disasters — very real worries, in the days before modern agriculture and medicine.
Fast Days were proclaimed in New England well into the 18th century, and continued after the American Revolution throughout much of the 19th century too, long after the separation of church and state had been established by the U.S. Constitution. They were still most common in New England states, though President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed several national Fast Days in the 1860s during the Civil War.
By the 1890s, however, only Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire celebrated Fast Days. In 1894, Massachusetts abolished Fast Day and replaced it with Patriot’s Day, a new holiday to honor the American Revolution.
Maine and New Hampshire continued to celebrate Fast Day for years after Massachusetts got rid of it, though most people simply enjoyed it as a day off, and not for any religious reasons. The Bangor Daily News in 1901 said that the public Fast Day was “a survival of that antiquated idea that church and state should be under one temporal head,” and that it was a “farcical law” that almost no one obeyed by actually fasting, just as some people sell “short lobsters,” shoot deer out of season and sell liquor in dry towns, despite laws against such actions.
If those BDN editorialists looked back even further, however, they’d see that the Fast Day tradition wasn’t just something from the Puritan era — it actually goes back thousands of years earlier, to the ancient Roman festival of Robigalia, held on April 25 each year. Robigalia’s main feature was an animal sacrifice to ask the gods to protect wheat fields from disease.
When Christianity replaced Roman polytheism in 4th century A.D., many former Roman festivals were turned into Christian celebrations. Rogalia became Rogation Days, celebrated in late April or early May by fasting, processions and priests blessing crops in the hopes of a healthy harvest. As Christianity began to splinter into different churches, the spring fast and crop blessing morphed into different types of celebrations, one of them being the Fast Days brought over to New England by British colonists in the 17th century.
Maine did not abolish its Fast Day until 1907, when it too replaced the holiday with Patriot’s’ Day — still a day off for most people and still held around the same time that Fast Day was held, in late April. According to the April 19, 1907, edition of the BDN, on the very first Patriot’s Day in Bangor, city government and local businesses were closed for at least half the day, and celebrations included a theatrical performance from the Knickerbocker Stock Company, a dance and a basketball game.
Fast Day wasn’t completely done yet, though. New Hampshire continued to celebrate Fast Day as a public holiday on the last Thursday of April until 1991, when it finally abolished it and moved the public day off to January, as Civil Rights Day. In 1999, that became Martin Luther King Jr. Day, making New Hampshire the last state in the country to adopt that holiday.
While Patriot’s Day isn’t a public holiday in Maine, it is in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, and it’s best known around the country for the yearly running of the Boston Marathon. It’s just the latest permutation of a springtime holiday that has its origins in antiquity, and people’s hopes for healthy crops, healthy families and the welcoming of warmer weather.
