The Great Famine Voices Roadshow will be launched in New York on 9th April at the American Irish Historical Society. The Great Famine Voices Roadshow is a series of open house events in the United States and Canada that bring together Irish emigrants, their descendants, and members of their communities to share family memories and stories of coming from Ireland to North America, especially during the period of the Great Hunger and afterwards.
“We are excited about meeting people during the Great Famine Voices Roadshow and hearing their family stories about how their ancestors came from Ireland to start new lives in the United States,” declared Christine Kinealy, Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. “We hope that people of Irish heritage in Canada will come to the Roadshow to share their family memories,” added Professor Mark McGowan from the University of Toronto.
“This Roadshow will provide a unique opportunity for Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians to share their stories, strengthen their sense of ancestry, and historical and current Irish connections. All are welcome to these events”, said Caroilin Callery, a Director of the National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, Ireland. “Over the past few years, we have been in search of stories from ‘the next Parish’ in North America, where so many of those who survived the Great Hunger – the biggest catastrophe of 19th century Europe – made new lives. We need to hear these stories,” she continued.
A selection of these family memories and stories will be made freely available on the Great Famine Voices online archive. www.greatfaminevoices.ie
The Great Famine Voices Roadshow in the USA and Canada will be hosted by the National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park, Ireland, and the Irish Heritage Trust, an independent charity. The Roadshow will be held in partnership with Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, the American Irish Historical Society, and the University of Toronto. It is funded by the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme.
DETAILS OF ROADSHOW VENUES – All Welcome to these Free Open House Events.
April 9th: American Irish Historical Society, 991 Fifth Avenue, New York (launch)
April 11th 4pm-8.30pm: Burns Library, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill
April 13th, 11am-4pm: Glucksman Ireland House, 1 Washington Mews, New York University
April 15th, 1pm-4:30pm: Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia.
May 22nd, 5-9pm: Madden Hall, St. Michael’s College, 81 St. Mary Street, University of Toronto.
May 27th, 10am-5pm: St. Gabriel’s Church, 2157 Centre Street (and Walk to the Stone), Montreal.
For media inquiries in the USA, contact: Turlough McConnell at tm@turloughmcconnell.com or Elizabeth Martin (917) 873-6613 ekm@turloughmconnell.com
For queries, or if you would like to contribute a family memory or story online, contact Dr Jason King at the Irish Heritage Trust: faminestudies@irishheritagetrust.ie
Irish Journeys: Famine Legacies and Reconnecting Communities.
The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School and International Conference:
Irish National Famine Museum, Strokestown Park House, the Irish Heritage Trust, and Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University
The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will take place at Strokestown Park House from 20th-24th June. The theme is Irish Journeys: Famine Legacies and Reconnecting Communities.
Strokestown Park House and the Irish National Famine Museum provide a hub for visitors and scholars to experience a uniquely preserved historic house and explore the lives of rich and poor in their original setting.
The 2018 Irish Famine Summer School will consider the Great Irish Famine and its legacies of dispersing communities between Ireland, Great Britain, North America, and Australia. Particular emphasis will be placed on the theme of Irish journeys at home and abroad, including the experiences of Irish emigrants and their descendants in building communities and becoming integrated into their host societies. The topics of homecoming, revisiting Ireland, and reconnecting communities between Irish and diasporic locations will also be central themes.
The annual Famine conference is an international, interdisciplinary event that brings together local, national and international Famine experts. We ask for papers that approach the subject ‘Irish Journeys’ from the broadest possible artistic, cultural, historical, and socio-economic perspectives. We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers and envisage dedicated panels on (but not limited to) the following themes:
Irish Journeys at home and abroad
The Irish Famine Migration to North America, Great Britain, and Australia
Migration, Integration, and community building in Ireland and the diaspora
Artistic, cultural, historic, and socioeconomic legacies of eviction and migration
Reconnecting Irish communities between Ireland and diasporic locations
Homecoming: revisiting Ireland
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Christine Kinealy (Quinnipiac University)
Professor Mark McGowan (University of Toronto)
Professor Mike Cronin (Boston College)
Professor Ian Kuijt (University of Notre Dame)
Professor Maureen Murphy (Hofstra University)
Enquiries and proposals of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note on the author, should be sent to Dr Jason King: faminestudies@Irishheritagetrust.ie and/or Professor Christine Kinealy (Christine.Kinealy@quinnipiac.edu) by 1 February 2018. Decisions on proposals as decided by the organising committee will be communicated by the end of February.
What if thousands of people lay dying on Montreal’s waterfront?
What if some of the city’s best doctors, nurses, members of the clergy and the mayor were caring for the sick newcomers at the risk of their own lives?
What if the dead were being buried in hastily dug trenches next to the makeshift hospital, piled three coffins deep?
What if the death toll rose to the equivalent of 12 per cent of the city’s population?
You’d think a city couldn’t forget a thing like that.
The events of Black 47 are very real to Montreal-born, Dublin-based historian Jason King. On visits to his hometown, King, academic coordinator for the Irish Heritage Trust, which operates the Irish National Famine Museum, always makes a point of visiting the site in Pointe-St-Charles where as many as 6,000 people died of typhus in 1847.
Historian Jason King stands under Le Typhus by Theophile Hamel on the ceiling of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal. The painting depicts the typhus epidemic of 1847 in which Montreal nuns cared for the sick in fever sheds in Pointe-St-Charles. Credit: Peter McCabe / Montreal Gazette
You pass under a railway bridge, past a Costco store, derelict warehouses and empty parking lots bordered by concrete blocks. It’s easy to miss the monument to the typhus victims — a rough boulder in the median between traffic lanes on Bridge St., near the Victoria Bridge. On it are inscribed the words:
“To Preserve from Desecration the Remains of 6000 Immigrants Who died of Ship Fever A.D. 1847-48
This Stone is erected by the Workmen of Messrs. Peto, Brassey and Betts Employed in the Construction of the Victoria Bridge A.D. 1859.”
King contemplates the stone in silence, broken only by passing vehicles, the sighing wind and screeching of seagulls.
“You do feel a real sense of connectedness when you come to the actual place,” he says.
“Usually, when I come I’m by myself. There’s really nobody here. There’s passing traffic, but that kind of becomes white noise after a minute or two. The rock and the strange, empty parking lot. It’s a very moving site, a very strange site,” King says.
Dozens of cities, including Toronto, New York, Boston and Philadelphia, have sites commemorating the one million Irish who fled their homeland during the Great Famine of 1846-51 — of whom an estimated one in five died en route of disease and starvation.
Each year, some 20,000 tourists journey to Grosse-Île, the former quarantine station near Quebec City where more than 5,000 famine migrants died in 1847.
But Montreal, whose Black Rock is the world’s oldest famine memorial, has no appropriate place of remembrance — just this dangerous spot in the middle of a busy commuter route.
Google Earth image shows location of the Black Rock. The proposed memorial park would be built on land now occupied by the parking lot above it, and cement site to the left.
Yet it was in Montreal that the tragedy struck hardest, and that the community most heroically rose to the challenge of helping the sick and dying, King says.
“Montreal was in a sense the epicentre of the 1847 famine migration,” he says.
“It was the largest city in British North America. It was the only major city to have famine refugees in massive numbers come into the city itself.”
For the past five years, members of the local Irish community have been working to create a memorial park honouring those who fled the famine, only to die on Montreal’s waterfront.
Their plan calls for moving the Black Rock to the future park on the east side of Bridge St. at rue des Irlandais, an area now occupied by a parking lot and Lafarge cement site.
But in May, organizers of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation learned the land earmarked for the park had been sold to Hydro-Québec, to build an electrical substation to supply the future Réseau électrique métropolitain (REM) train. Mayor Denis Coderre, who had initially pledged support for the park, now insists the substation must go ahead but has promised to find a compromise.
Coderre and other city officials refused to be interviewed for this article.
The Black Rock memorial marking the graves of typhus victims is lowered into place in 1859. Credit: William Notman / McCord Museum
The city is also keeping mum on its plans for the rest of the area between Bridge St., the Bonaventure Expressway and Mill St. — formerly the working-class neighbourhood of Goose Village, which the city demolished in 1964. The Coderre administration is reportedly eyeing the site for a future baseball stadium, to bring back Major League Baseball to Montreal.
“The Goose Village sector is targeted in the Stratégie Centre-Ville (a downtown development plan) which will be unveiled in the near future,” is all city spokesperson Jules Chamberland would say in an email exchange.
The REM project calls for a light-rail station underneath the Lachine Canal’s Peel Basin, with a north entrance in Griffintown and a south entrance about a 10-minute walk from the Goose Village site.
But to King, any project that brushes aside the site’s tragic history would be a violation of the last resting place of the thousands who died.
“You can’t imagine this happening anywhere else, that you’d have a mass grave in complete abandonment,” he says.
Sylvain Gaudet, a researcher with the Société d’histoire de Pointe-Saint-Charles, has pored over newspapers, maps and property records to document the burial grounds where the typhus victims were laid to rest. Initially, the sick were housed in sheds near the Peel Basin; later, sheds were built for them on the Goose Village site. Archaeological research is needed to determine what traces remain of the thousands buried at the two sites, Gaudet said.
Historian Jason King at the Irish Commemorative Stone, the Black Rock, situated in the median between traffic lanes on Bridge St. Proponents want a memorial park to be built on an adjacent site, and the rock moved there. Credit: Peter McCabe / Montreal Gazette
Anne-Marie Balac, an archaeologist who worked for Quebec’s Ministry of Culture for 27 years and is now a consultant, said “it’s unthinkable” to allow any project to be built without a thorough investigation of what lies under the ground.
“We know it has a very high archaeological potential because it’s a cemetery,” she said.
Several bodies have been unearthed over the years, including during roadwork and building of the Costco, leaving no doubt that the site is a former cemetery, Balac said.
In 1942, excavations near the entrance to the Victoria Bridge turned up the coffins of 12 typhus victims in a trench-like grave. They were reinterred near the Black Rock.
“It’s urgent to act before going too far,” Balac said.
* * *
In the spring of 1847, Montrealers braced for an influx from famine-stricken Ireland, where the potato crop had failed in both of the previous two years.
“We learn from British papers and private letters published in those of the United States, that the preparations for emigration from Britain, and especially from Ireland, are unprecedentedly great,” the Montreal Witness newspaper reported on March 8.
Fever sheds along the near shore, to the right, are seen from Mount Royal in 1852 in this lithograph by Endicott & Co. Credit: McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections
Fearing a deluge of undesirables, the United States tightened regulations for passenger ships, pushing up travel costs.
This meant the poorest immigrants would be forced to travel via Quebec City and Montreal, the Witness correctly predicted.
Soon “our shores are likely to be thronged with emigrants, chiefly of a class who will have little or nothing left when they arrive,” the paper warned, urging that “no time ought to be lost” in making preparations.
But nothing could have prepared Montrealers for what they saw when sick and starving immigrants began stepping off steamboats from Quebec City.
“Good God! What a spectacle. Hundreds of people, most of them lying naked on planks haphazardly, men, women and children, sick, moribund and cadavers; all of this confusion hit the eyes at once,” the Annals of the Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns) reported on June 7.
The overcrowded “coffin ships” that brought the migrants to the New World — often Canadian timber vessels making the return trip with a human cargo — were the perfect breeding ground for typhus, spread by body lice infected with the Rickettsia prowazekii bacterium. (The cause would not be discovered until 1916.)
Theophile Hamel’s painting, Le Typhus, on the ceiling inside the entrance to Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal. Nuns, priests, Protestant clergy and others disregarded their own safety to care for the newcomers. Credit: Peter McCabe
“Hundreds of poor people, men, women, and children of all ages, from the drivelling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a fetid atmosphere…” Irish landowner and social reformer StephenDe Verewrote of a crossing to Quebec in 1847.
A foul odour wafted from the immigrant ships, like the stink of a dunghill on a foggy day, observed Grosse-Île’s medical superintendent, Dr. George Douglas.
“I never saw people so indifferent to life – they would continue in the same berth with a dead person until the seamen or captain dragged out the corpse with boat hooks,” Douglas wrote in a letter to the chief immigration agent in Quebec City.
Of the 100,000 who sailed for British North America in 1847, an estimated 70,000 arrived in Montreal, then a town of 50,000.
At first, the sick were housed in existing sheds on the south bank of the Peel Basin of the Lachine Canal. As the epidemic spread, prominent citizens demanded that a quarantine station be set up on the Boucherville Islands. But authorities rejected that idea as impractical and decided to build new sheds on the shore of the St. Lawrence, approximately where the Black Rock stands today. At the time, the site was on the waterfront but today the river is farther away because landfill has altered the shoreline.
By Aug. 1, patients were being cared for in 21 new, well-ventilated sheds, with a total capacity of 1,800. (Good ventilation was considered essential for healing because people then believed disease was spread by miasmas, or bad air.)
Those who died were buried next to the sheds, in long trenches where the coffins were piled three deep.
“The sheds were more or less here, on the waterfront,” King says.
“On the one hand, it’s a scene of utter desolation and desperation, with hundreds of people dying in abject misery, but also there’s a lot of compassion and there’s a lot of caring towards them,” he says.
While the tragedy was the city’s darkest moment, it was also in some ways its finest hour, he says.
“For all of the deaths, all of the anxiety and the fear, it’s in many ways a positive story. It’s a story of self-sacrifice, a story of people rising to the occasion,” he adds.
Nuns, priests, Protestant clergy and others disregarded their own safety to care for the newcomers. The Mohawks of Kahnawake brought food for the starving strangers.
“These are much, much bigger challenges than we can possibly imagine. When there were real risks, we accepted them all, with a generosity of spirit I think we rarely see today anywhere,” King says.
Wood engraving by John Henry Walker, between 1859 and 1885, shows the Black Rock on the waterfront. Today, landfill has greatly altered the shoreline. Credit: McCord Museum
Estimates of the death toll in Montreal in 1847 vary from 3,579 by Nov. 1 — the number reported by Canada’s chief immigration agent in Quebec City — to the 6,000 recorded on the Black Rock, which includes deaths in 1848. In its report for 1847, the city’s emigration committee stated 3,862 died of typhus in Montreal that year.
Quebec families adopted hundreds of Irish orphans at the urging of Catholic bishop Ignace Bourget. Their descendants are among the 40 per cent of Quebecers who claim some Irish ancestry.
“When the Irish settled in urban areas, they became English. When they settled in rural areas, they became French-Canadian, retaining their Irish surnames but otherwise indistinguishable from everyone else,” King notes.
Today, as Haitian asylum-seekers are sheltered in the Olympic Stadium and Syrian refugees adjust to life in Canada, the city’s response to the famine migrants of 1847 sends a powerful message, King says.
“After that initial moment of panic, it’s a story of people becoming accepted into their new communities, people becoming new French-Canadians or Irish-Canadians,” King says.
“In a nutshell, it’s a story of integration.”
* * *
Lithograph shows, in the background, fever sheds for the typhus victims of 1847 during the 1850s, when they were used to house the workers who built the Victoria Bridge from 1854-1859. Credit: McCord Museum
Voices from Montreal’s Summer of Sorrow
Numerous sources, including records kept by religious communities and newspaper reports, paint a vivid account of the famine migration to Montreal.
Related links
Bitterness and hope as Montreal Irish commemorate 1847 famine
Opinion: Montreal Mayor John Easton Mills helped the desperate
“One of the most remarkable things is that the Annals of the Grey Nuns are one of the most detailed records of any famine site anywhere in the world,” historian Jason King says.
“There are very absorbing descriptions of people arriving in unprecedented numbers,” he says.
“We’re very lucky to have those records.”
Local newspapers recounted the evolving crisis and vigorously debated on how it should be dealt with.
The following extracts provide a glimpse of how Montreal’s Summer of Sorrow unfolded:
June 7: When sick and starving Irish immigrants begin arriving in Montreal, the Grey Nuns step forward to nurse them.
Our Mother Superior heard that there were a great number of sick people lying outdoors along the docks and that they found themselves in the saddest of shape.
Immigrants who arrived in the city were required to report to the immigration office, which looked like this one from Illustrated London News in 1850. Credit: McCord Museum
After going out to investigate, she returned to the Mother House to describe the horrific condition of the immigrants and ask for volunteers.
She did not need to do so more than once, since our dear Sisters came in large numbers.
(Annals of the Grey Nuns)
June 13: As thousands pour into the city, the typhus sheds near the Lachine Canal are quickly overwhelmed. Patients are crowded three to a bed, with corpses lying alongside the living. Bodies pile up outside, awaiting burial.
The Grey Nuns record heartrending scenes, like a man who arrives from Grosse-Île searching for his wife, who had been sent on to Montreal before him. He finally spots her corpse on a pile of bodies and takes it in his arms, calling her name and kissing her, unable to believe that she is really dead.
Once he is convinced that she no longer exists, he abandons himself to his pain; the air is filled with his cries and sobs. … Scenes of this nature occur several times a day.
(Annals of the Grey Nuns)
A works map for the Victoria Bridge shows, along the shore, rows of workmen’s houses that formerly served as fever sheds for typhus sufferers. Credit: McCord Museum
June 21:With deaths from typhus averaging 20 per day, newspapers praise the tireless devotion of the nuns, priests and doctors caring for the patients around the clock. Most heartbreaking is the plight of the orphaned babies.
The most piteous sight of all, perhaps, is a separate shed, appropriated to the orphans, and in which sixty or eighty poor little creatures, some of them not many weeks old, are lying four and six in a berth, many of them wailing in every variety of tone. The priests, nuns, and others, are very attentive to these forlorn babes; but there appear to be no wet nurses yet, and it is almost impossible that many of them can survive.
(Montreal Witness)
June 24: Bishop Ignace Bourget calls on Quebecers to adopt the orphaned children.
Today, they are speaking through our voice to reach your hearts: “Do for us poor little orphans what you would want others to do for your own children if, like us, they had the misfortune to lose you in a distant country; if like us, they were on a foreign shore, without relatives or friends … if like us, they had no one to care for them; and especially, if, like us, they risked losing the faith for which their fathers had fought to the death.”
(Pastoral letter)
July 4: With caregivers falling ill, critics suggest it was a mistake to help the newcomers.
We very much regret that the church authorities allowed the hospital sisters to leave their convent to care for the sick. … This kindness towards the emigrants seems to us a little exaggerated. If the government wants to send us so many of these unfortunate people, who are bringing plague and famine here, it’s up to the government to care for them and support them.
(La Minerve)
Front page of The Montreal Witness, March 15, 1847.
July 5: Workers succumb to typhus as the disease spreads.
There is not a doubt now that the fever, which is the prevailing malady among these immigrants, is highly contagious. Mr. Yarwood’s (the immigration agent for Montreal) death has already been mentioned, and we are sorry to add that two or three of the doctors here are ill, including Dr. Liddell, the chief emigrant physician. Nineteen of the nuns are said to be more or less sufferers from the prevailing malady, and many of the other nurses have been laid down by fever. The disease is also spreading through the city.
(Montreal Witness)
July 12: Debate rages over where to construct the new hospital sheds. Prominent citizens call for the immigrants to be moved to the Boucherville Islands, where they will not infect local residents. But the Medical Commission, headed by Mayor John Easton Mills, nixes that idea, saying doctors and nurses could not be found to work there and that steamships would not be able to dock there.
It was, therefore, after much consideration, resolved to build the new Hospitals upon the most approved principles on the high bank of the St. Lawrence, at Point St. Charles… — John E. Mills, Chairman, Emigrant Commissioners
(Montreal Witness)
July 15: More than 1,000 citizens attend a protest meeting at Bonsecours Market on July 13 demanding the immigrants be removed to the Boucherville Islands site.
The great majority of citizens want the emigrants to be moved elsewhere to prevent the contagion that is decimating our city but the authorities are opposing them! … Ministers, priests, nuns and citizens have already paid for their devotion with their lives, many others are at death’s door, while they pretend to believe that there is no danger and refuse to remedy the situation.
(La Minerve)
The Black Rock in a photograph dated March 27, 1898, by Alfred Walter Roper. Credit: McCord Museum
July 26: As construction of the new hospital sheds nears completion, newspapers pay tribute to the caregivers who gave up their lives, dubbing them “The True Legion of Honour.”
In relation to the self-sacrificing spirit which actuated the whole Roman Catholic and Protestant Clergy of Montreal … there can be but one opinion, and that opinion pervades all classes and conditions of our population. We speak with the soberness of truth when we say that they have shown a zeal in the cause of suffering humanity rarely equalled, certainly not surpassed — worthy indeed of their august and sacred calling and honourable to the character of that religion whose doctrines they are appointed to teach.
(Montreal Pilot, reprinted in the Montreal Witness)
Aug. 13: Bishop Bourget pays tribute to fallen nuns and priests.
Since the 8th of July, the Lord has visited us to take away eight Priests, 10 Nuns and a large number of laypersons who devoted themselves, with praiseworthy zeal, to the spiritual and bodily service of the sick.
Alas! This pitiless illness has reached these heroines of Catholicism. … They have fallen, they who, like angels of peace, consoled so many tortured souls.
(Pastoral letter)
John Easton Mills was the mayor of Montreal from 1846 to 1847, when he died of typhus.
Nov. 15: Mayor Mills dies.
It is with profound grief we announce to our readers the death of John E. Mills, Esq., Mayor of this City, of typhus fever. This melancholy event which took place last Friday morning (Nov. 12) at 11 o’clock, has caused a deep feeling of sorrow throughout every class in the community.
National Famine Walk: ‘Remember your soul and your liberty’
Famine scholars are about to follow in the footsteps of the 1,490 tenants forcibly exiled to Canada from Denis Mahon’s Strokestown estate
Thu, May 25, 2017, 17:11 Updated: Thu, May 25, 2017, 17:12
Michael Collins and Jason King
One of Rowan Gillespie’s Famine statues in Dublin. Photograph: Kate Geraghty
The National Famine Walk will take place over six days from May 27th to June 1st as an international group of Famine scholars follow in the footsteps of the 1,490 tenants from Denis Mahon’s Strokestown Park House estate, who were escorted by a bailiff to Dublin to ensure they boarded ship and left Ireland in 1847.
(Shared here with kind permission of RTÉ News)
The tenants’ fate after they left Dublin is a harrowing one. They travelled on open deck packet steamers to Liverpool, where they waited in the cellars of quayside buildings at Liverpool docks to board ships to Canada. The four ships they boarded – Erin’s Queen, Naomi, The Virginius and The John Munn – were badly fitted out and poorly provisioned. Almost half of those who embarked died aboard ship or in the “fever sheds” at the Grosse Île quarantine station when they arrived in Quebec. Of course, this was not known to them as they walked along the Royal Canal to Dublin, away from hunger and hoping for a better life.
The National Famine Walk begins at one of the numerous points of origin for what has been an ongoing research initiative to document the passage of more than 100,000 tenants forcibly exiled to Canada in 1847. The transatlantic voyage and passage along the Saint Lawrence river from Quebec to Toronto resulted in the second greatest loss of life in the Victorian era, second only to the Crimean War. Of those who left, more than 20,000 perished at sea or along the Saint Lawrence River, marking Canada with the infamous distinction of having the largest Irish mass graves outside of Ireland.
The 1847 evictions, transfer and passage to Canada encapsulate a twice-told tale.
First, it’s a story of British government and Irish landlord neglect. Mahon evicted 3,006 tenants and paid just under £4,000 for the passage of almost 1,000 of those he assisted to emigrate. For his unfailing cruelty, on November 2nd, 1847, Mahon was shot to death as he travelled home to Strokestown House from a Board of Guardians meeting. Murder was not a deterrent for the landlords. Evictions continued until some 11,000 persons of the 12,000 tenants were removed from Mahon’s estate.
In exporting evicted tenants, passage to Canada proved the cheaper alternative to America, given that the American authorities, anticipating the influx of a starving flotsam of Irish, amended their maritime Passenger Acts. Imposing stricter regulations, the acts barred disease-ridden ships from arriving into American ports. In 1847, the most destitute Irish emigrants were sent to the British North American colonies in New Brunswick and Canada East and West (Quebec and Ontario) on retrofitted lumber vessels as human ballast. These coffin ships averaged over 300 persons per vessel, three times that allowed under the American Passenger Acts. Mortality rates approached 40 per cent.
The story of emigration to Canada is, secondly, a contrasting one of succour and sacrifice, as a predominantly Catholic, French Canadian province of Quebec braced for and ministered to a dispossessed, disease-ravaged people in one of the greatest unrecognised human refugee crises of the 19th century.
The immigrant numbers are extraordinary. Most of them arrived at Grosse Île in Quebec, which is now a National Historic Site with a glass wall memorial for the 5,000 Irish interred in mass graves on the island. Grosse Île is twinned with the Irish National Famine Museum at Strokestown Park House, where Taoiseach Enda Kenny unveiled a similar glass wall memorial to its missing 1,490 emigrants in 2014.
Many of those 1,490 emigrants died on Grosse Île. It was there that James Quinn, a 45-year-old Irish emigrant from Lissonuffy, on the Strokestown Park estate, whispered his dying words to his two young sons, Patrick (12) and Thomas (6): “Remember your soul and your liberty”.
The orphaned Quinn brothers were adopted by a French-Canadian family who gave them a good education. They both entered the seminary and became priests with joint French and Irish congregations. In 1877, Patrick Quinn founded the still flourishing St. Patrick Society in Richmond, Quebec, where there is a theatre named after him. His younger brother, Thomas Quinn, became a champion for his French-Canadian parishioners.
At the First Congress of the French Language in Quebec City, on June 25th, 1912, Thomas Quinn thanked the French-Canadian people for their generosity. In a speech entitled “Une Voix d’Irlande” (A Voice of Ireland), he declared in French:
“It was in 1847. A famine, even worse than the one which had preceded it, threatened the Irish people with total extinction. The most astonishing part of the awful spectacle was, not to see the people die, but to see them live through such great distress. Like walking skeletons they went, in tears, seeking hospitality from more favoured lands. Stirred with compassion, French-Canadian priests, braving the epidemic, contended for the glory of rushing to their relief. I still remember one of these admirable clergymen who led us to the bedside of my dying father. As he saw us, my father with his failing voice repeated the old Irish adage, ‘Remember your soul and your liberty’.”
Like the Quinn brothers, Daniel and Catherine Tighe also sailed to Grosse Île where they were orphaned, adopted by a French-Canadian family, and allowed to keep their Irish surname. In 2000, Jim Callery, founder of the Irish National Famine Museum, visited Daniel’s son Léo Tye in rural Quebec and heard the story that inspired the search for the missing 1,490 Strokestown emigrants. He also unveiled a Celtic Cross Famine memorial in Quebec City that he had donated on behalf of the Famine Museum. In July 2013, Léo’s son Richard Tye made a return visit from Quebec to Strokestown, and was reunited with the Irish branch of the family. His Irish cousin Philip Tighe will be on the National Famine Walk.
The suffering of Famine emigrants was not confined to Grosse Île. With the arrival of 75,000 typhus-afflicted refugees, the city of Montreal, then a city of 50,000, hastily erected fever sheds to contain disease. The Annals of the Grey Nuns, a recently translated cache of diaries, details the convergence of municipal and religious groups involved in saving Irish lives, often at great personal cost. Notable casualties included the Protestant mayor of Montreal and myriad priests and nuns who worked the fever sheds of Pointe Sainte Charles.
In the wake of the emigrant passing through Montreal, over 3,000 Irish orphan children left in the care of religious orders were eventually adopted, like the Quinn and Tighe siblings, into French-Canadian families.
The journey onward into Ontario has its own history. Less a story of commonality and religious succour, the death toll is lower, given how most afflicted died at Grosse Île and Montreal. Also, a subtle sectionalism led to journalistic self-censorship in accurately chronicling the passage and burial of those who died along riverside towns throughout Ontario.
Such was the forgotten history of Canadian involvement with the fated year of 1847, simply because the crisis and sacrifice had happened so far away, within a single season. For the most part, accounts of the worst suffering were recorded in French, so the episode closed in the forgotten reaches of Quebec. That is, until recently.
In 2016, Irish author and ultra-runner Michael Collins ran a marathon-a-day for a month from Grosse Île to Toronto; he was inspired by his reading of the Grey Nuns’ annals. En route, along the Saint Lawrence, he met historical societies researching their town’s archives and recorded anecdotal stories passed down by descendants, which he documented on his Irish Diaspora Run 2016 Facebook page. More than 100,000 people visited the page during the run, and he has reactivated it for the National Famine Walk.
The project continues. At Grosse Île quarantine station, a memorial serves as a cautionary reminder of what can befall a dispossessed people, and at the terminus of the route in Toronto, Ireland Park has become a place of pilgrimage, memorialising the passage of 1847. Situated along Toronto’s docklands, a series of Rowan Gillespie Famine sculptures reach back across the ocean to Gillespie’s Famine sculptures on Dublin’s Custom House Quay Docklands. Without descriptive plaques detailing the history of 1847, the sculptures simultaneously encompass and transcend Irish history, evoking the universality of the immigrant experience, both past and present. In the furtherance of peace, Ireland Park Foundation has reconfigured a national tragedy, not as a source of differentiation, but of shared experience. In 2017, the foundation will unveil Dr George Robert Grasett Park, celebrating the efforts of the Canadian medical profession which so tirelessly worked to save both those who arrived and Toronto’s own citizens from disease.
What remains yet to be memorialised is Montreal’s response to 1847. Specifically, The Black Rock memorial, a stone hastily erected by workmen who uncovered over 6,000 bodies during the 1859 construction of the Victoria Bridge, lies in the median of a major arterial in downtown Montreal and is in jeopardy of being summarily removed as the city plans a major overhaul of the area. The Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation is locked in a tenuous battle with city, provincial and federal authorities to preserve and allocate what is currently an abandoned parking lot as the future site of a memorial grounds honoring both the 1847 emigrants and those who came to their aid.
The National Famine Walk complements these projects to ensure that Famine emigrants like Strokestown’s missing 1,490 are commemorated on both sides of the Atlantic. In following in their footsteps, the walkers are not only honouring their legacy. They are embarking on a journey to trace the descendants of the 1,490 emigrants in Canada and the United States, especially from Irish Famine orphans adopted in Quebec. They are also laying the foundation for a permanent walking trail along the Royal Canal between Strokestown and Dublin, the National Famine Way. With its advent, hitherto inaccessible paths are providing opportunities to walk in the footsteps of the dispossessed.
Prof. Christine Kinealy (and founding director of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University) talks to ADAPT about the cultural impact of the great famine and how it influenced Ireland in years to come.
Author Cathal Poirteir tells about the particular character from the 1,490 who left Strokestown, one John O’Connor. His story is a tragic one as he died during the famine, but not from hunger!
Famine Way Walkers Re-enact the arrival of the 1,490 at Spencer Dock, Dublin.
Having waked from Strokestown, Co Roscommon, Famine Way Walkers 2018 re-enact the final steps journey of 1490 migrant tenants from Strokestown as they made their way towards the replica famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston. This is a playlist of three short but separate videos.
The National Famine Way is being developed by Strokestown Park House, the Irish National Famine Museum, and the Irish Heritage Trust in partnership with Waterways Ireland, the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology, Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University, Ireland Park Foundation, the University of Toronto, Royal Canal Amenity Group, Roscommon and Longford County Councils, and Strokestown Community Town Team.
On day five of the walk, the walkers met with Dr Ciarán Reilly who gave them a tour of the Carton House estate near Maynooth. Dr Reilly is the leading expert on the Strokestown Park Archive and one of the most distinguished scholars in the field. His book Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (Four Courts, 2014) combines incisive analysis of the records in the archive with high quality reproductions of some of its most important documents.
Ciaran Reilly’s book Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine is:
‘The most in-depth study of the effects of the Famine on a landed estate and its community … With the help of this book, we are brought deep inside the actuality of life during the Famine era. Some of our preconceived ideas of what actually transpired during that appalling era are challenged. Highlighted too is the important role played by the Irish National Famine Museum at Strokestown’, from the foreword by Mary McAleese, former President of Ireland.
The Strokestown Park House archive is one of the largest Irish estate collections in existence, with more than 50,000 documents comprising rentals, leases, accounts, correspondence, maps, drawings, architectural plans and photographs. Of particular importance are the papers that relate to the Great Irish Famine. This book aims to introduce the reader to the archive and to provide a fascinating and detailed insight into the many and varied experiences of the Famine for those who inhabited the estate in the 1840s.
In Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine, Reilly traces many of the 1490. In his own words:
While the Strokestown Park archive provides a fascinating insight into people who emigrated during and immediately after the Famine, their fate afterwards is more difficult to track. For the vast majority we are offered only fleeting glimpses of their lives after leaving Ireland. An example is John Coleman, one of ninety-nine emigrants who left the townland of Curhouna during the assisted emigration programme of 1847. Having survived the crossing, Coleman made his way to New Orleans where by 1851 he was listed as being a patient in the city hospital. One of 1,100 men and women, including over 20 Roscommon natives, who sought medical treatment in the hospital in 1851 alone, the ultimate fate of Coleman is unknown. Likewise, Margaret Flynn, aged 24, and her son John, aged one, who were described as “destitute”; having survived the voyage on board the Virginius in July 1847, they made their way inland to St John, New Brunswick, where they found shelter in the city’s almshouses in 1851 (139-142).
More information about Margaret Flynn and her son John can be found here:
Ciarán Reilly has also co-authored Women and the Great Hunger with the Famine walkers Christine Kinealy and Jason King (Cork and Quinnipiac University Press).
Ciarán Reilly has also published The Famine Irish: Emigration and the Great Hunger (History Press, 2016), which includes Jason King’s chapter about the 1490 entitled “Une Voix d’Irlande: Integration, Migration, and Travelling Nationalism Between Famine Ireland and Quebec in the Long Nineteenth Century”, 193-208.
The story of the 1490 is one that has been reconstructed from the treasure trove of documents found in the Strokestown Park Archive.
An extract from the Cloonahee Petition, 1846, Strokestown Park Archive.
The leading scholars in the field attest to its significance:
The archive is one of the largest collections of famine documents in the world ……….most of these documents have not seen the light of day since they were generated almost 170 years ago’
Dr Ciaran Reilly, Maynooth University, Ireland
‘The Strokestown Park Archive represents a jewel in famine studies, and one that has great significance beyond Roscommon and the island of Ireland’.
Professor Christine Kinealy,
Director, Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute, Quinnipiac University, Hamden, CT
“The archive at Strokestown Park House is a treasure trove for social historians intent upon reconstructing life on an Irish estate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Equally important is the rich deposit of records from the Irish Famine period, which when viewed in the context of other collections available to the public in Ireland, ranks as one of vital importance to historians of the Great Hunger. Moreover, manuscripts generated by the Pakenham-Mahon family provide valuable links to other landed families in Ireland and to larger Imperial and diasporic networks. Thus the archive is not just of local or Irish interest, but provides potential research projects for scholars across the globe.”
Dr Mark G. McGowan
The collection containing over 55,000 documents is of international significance in relation to the Famine period and also a complete record of economic, social, and estate history over a 300 year period.
A dedicated environmentally controlled archive room has been created above the stables and a study centre within the stable wing is being created.
Documents from the Strokestown Park House Archive are also being digitized and made publicly available on the Great Famine Voices website:
Irish Canadian Famine Research 