‘Our voices will not be silenced': Montreal Irish community remembers 6,000 who died in 1847
By
Dozens of members of the Irish community and community leaders walked 2.1 kilometres on Sunday to remember and honour the 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus during the summer of 1847 and are buried in a mass grave in an industrial area on Bridge St., southeast of Montreal's downtown core.
The location of the largest mass grave in Canada is marked by a 30-tonne, three-metre-high boulder known officially as the Irish Commemorative Stone but more commonly known as the Black Rock. It was placed there in 1859 by labourers building the Victoria Bridge who uncovered bones of those who had perished of typhus. The workers, many of them Irish, planted a boulder dredged from the St. Lawrence River over the burial site. They inscribed it in part: 'To preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever.' (Typhus was known then as ship fever.) Pollution from the nearby railroad and vehicle traffic has coloured the monument black.
The 157th edition of the Annual Walk to the Stone, as Sunday's event is known, was organized by the Ancient Order of Hibernians to honour the dead, those who tried to save them and their descendants. Some participants were regulars: Eighty-three-year-old Montrealer Brian McBrien, for instance, said he did the walk for the first time at the age of three. The Ancient Order of Hibernians is an Irish Catholic fraternal organization with roots in Ireland and a significant presence in the Canada and the United States.
Sunday's walk, which began following a memorial mass Sunday morning at St. Charles Catholic Church, featured a Montreal police escort and, at the front of the line of walkers, piper Alan Jones. The 75 or so participants, a number wearing green, included Canadian and American representatives of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, representatives of the St. Gabriel's Elementary School community and MNA Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, whose riding includes the monument.
Victor Boyle, national president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Canada, presided over brief presentations at the Black Rock. Among those who placed wreaths at the rock were Lori Morrison, president of the United Irish Societies; Danny Doyle, president of the Erin Sports Association; Carol Clifton, a longtime educator and lunch monitor at St. Gabriel Elementary School in Pointe-St-Charles; Kevin Callahan of the Friends of Sinn Féin Canada and Bryan Essiambré, representing the Little Angels charity.
'It is so important that we are here to honour our ancestors,' said Morrison. 'It is a testament to our resilience as a people — and our voices will not be silenced.'
A fungal infection in Ireland in 1845 caused half the potato crop to rot in the earth; in 1846 it wiped out almost the entire crop. Potatoes were the main source of sustenance for much of the population and estimates place the death toll in Ireland of the Great Hunger or the Great Famine, as it was also known, at about one million. A million or more chose emigration and about 100,000 headed for Canada, then a colony of British North America. British traders shipping lumber from Quebec City and St. John's were happy to have impoverished emigrants to pay low fares and serve as ballast on the return trip to Canada.
Typhus, meanwhile, was raging though Ireland. The disease, which causes severe headaches, high fever, rashes, delirium and death, is passed to humans through lice. It was rampant also on the ships that carried the emigrants, crammed in the holds below deck.
Some of those who died en route are buried around St. Andrews, N.B. Overwhelmed Canadian officials intercepted thousands of ill travellers at Quebec's Grosse-Île, known then as Quarantine Island and now a national historic site with more than 5,000 graves.
Men, women and children 'deemed in good health' were allowed to continue their journey to Montreal — and many brought typhus with them. The local population showed great compassion. John Mills, Montreal's mayor at the time, commissioned the construction of more than 20 large 'fever sheds' for ill newcomers in the neighbourhood that is today Pointe-St-Charles and, with the Grey Nuns, led efforts to care for them. Many, including Mills, lost their lives to typhus. The Mohawk community also came to the assistance of the sick. Many priests fell ill after leaning in to hear the last confessions of the dying. More than 1,000 orphans were adopted by Quebecers.
In 2023 the Black Rock Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation became the new owner of the Black Rock. The site, which had previously been the property of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, is a small patch of greenery in the median of a heavily travelled street near the base of the Victoria Bridge linking Montreal and the South Shore, not far from the Bridge St. Costco. With support from the City of Montreal, the space is to be transformed into a park.
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Montreal Gazette
26-05-2025
- Montreal Gazette
‘Our voices will not be silenced': Montreal Irish community remembers 6,000 who died in 1847
By Dozens of members of the Irish community and community leaders walked 2.1 kilometres on Sunday to remember and honour the 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus during the summer of 1847 and are buried in a mass grave in an industrial area on Bridge St., southeast of Montreal's downtown core. The location of the largest mass grave in Canada is marked by a 30-tonne, three-metre-high boulder known officially as the Irish Commemorative Stone but more commonly known as the Black Rock. It was placed there in 1859 by labourers building the Victoria Bridge who uncovered bones of those who had perished of typhus. The workers, many of them Irish, planted a boulder dredged from the St. Lawrence River over the burial site. They inscribed it in part: 'To preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever.' (Typhus was known then as ship fever.) Pollution from the nearby railroad and vehicle traffic has coloured the monument black. The 157th edition of the Annual Walk to the Stone, as Sunday's event is known, was organized by the Ancient Order of Hibernians to honour the dead, those who tried to save them and their descendants. Some participants were regulars: Eighty-three-year-old Montrealer Brian McBrien, for instance, said he did the walk for the first time at the age of three. The Ancient Order of Hibernians is an Irish Catholic fraternal organization with roots in Ireland and a significant presence in the Canada and the United States. Sunday's walk, which began following a memorial mass Sunday morning at St. Charles Catholic Church, featured a Montreal police escort and, at the front of the line of walkers, piper Alan Jones. The 75 or so participants, a number wearing green, included Canadian and American representatives of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, representatives of the St. Gabriel's Elementary School community and MNA Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, whose riding includes the monument. Victor Boyle, national president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Canada, presided over brief presentations at the Black Rock. Among those who placed wreaths at the rock were Lori Morrison, president of the United Irish Societies; Danny Doyle, president of the Erin Sports Association; Carol Clifton, a longtime educator and lunch monitor at St. Gabriel Elementary School in Pointe-St-Charles; Kevin Callahan of the Friends of Sinn Féin Canada and Bryan Essiambré, representing the Little Angels charity. 'It is so important that we are here to honour our ancestors,' said Morrison. 'It is a testament to our resilience as a people — and our voices will not be silenced.' A fungal infection in Ireland in 1845 caused half the potato crop to rot in the earth; in 1846 it wiped out almost the entire crop. Potatoes were the main source of sustenance for much of the population and estimates place the death toll in Ireland of the Great Hunger or the Great Famine, as it was also known, at about one million. A million or more chose emigration and about 100,000 headed for Canada, then a colony of British North America. British traders shipping lumber from Quebec City and St. John's were happy to have impoverished emigrants to pay low fares and serve as ballast on the return trip to Canada. Typhus, meanwhile, was raging though Ireland. The disease, which causes severe headaches, high fever, rashes, delirium and death, is passed to humans through lice. It was rampant also on the ships that carried the emigrants, crammed in the holds below deck. Some of those who died en route are buried around St. Andrews, N.B. Overwhelmed Canadian officials intercepted thousands of ill travellers at Quebec's Grosse-Île, known then as Quarantine Island and now a national historic site with more than 5,000 graves. Men, women and children 'deemed in good health' were allowed to continue their journey to Montreal — and many brought typhus with them. The local population showed great compassion. John Mills, Montreal's mayor at the time, commissioned the construction of more than 20 large 'fever sheds' for ill newcomers in the neighbourhood that is today Pointe-St-Charles and, with the Grey Nuns, led efforts to care for them. Many, including Mills, lost their lives to typhus. The Mohawk community also came to the assistance of the sick. Many priests fell ill after leaning in to hear the last confessions of the dying. More than 1,000 orphans were adopted by Quebecers. In 2023 the Black Rock Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation became the new owner of the Black Rock. The site, which had previously been the property of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, is a small patch of greenery in the median of a heavily travelled street near the base of the Victoria Bridge linking Montreal and the South Shore, not far from the Bridge St. Costco. With support from the City of Montreal, the space is to be transformed into a park.
CBC
04-05-2025
- CBC
You've heard of a Christmas tree — how about a May bush?
This festive springtime tradition survives in a handful of Newfoundland communities Take a drive along the Avalon Peninsula's Cape Shore or Killick Coast this May, and you may come upon an unfamiliar type of holiday tree: a spruce or fir, stripped of its lower boughs so that only a tuft is left at the top, which is decked out in blue ribbons. You might wonder if it's some kind of straggler from the Christmas holidays, but this festive evergreen has its own long tradition on the island. Called May bushes, May trees, or May poles, depending on the community, these decorations customarily went up on May 1, and stayed up for the rest of the month. They're a vestige of the May Day celebrations that were once common across Northern Europe. Heralding the coming of summer and the beginning of the agricultural season, May 1 was an opportunity to rejoice in the renewal of the Earth after a long, cold winter. Merrymakers gathered wildflowers, lit bonfires, and, in some areas, selected a queen of May to preside over their revels. The cornerstone of most May Day festivities was the May pole, a tall wooden post strung with garlands or ribbons. The May pole often served as the centrepiece of a circle dance, though the version you might have seen in films — where dancers hold the ends of streamers attached to the pole and circle around it until the ribbons are wound all the way to the base — probably wasn't invented until the 19th century. Despite their scenic charm, May poles weren't universally admired. Protestant reformers were harsh critics of exuberant holidays like May Day, which they suspected of having pagan origins. In a 1644 ordinance"for the better observation of the Lords-Day," the Puritan-majority British parliament — the same parliament that would later outlaw Christmas — banned May poles, calling them "a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness." Their use wasn't reinstated in the United Kingdom until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. A Newfoundland bush with Irish roots A version of the May pole made its way to Newfoundland with the immigrants who sailed from southeast Ireland in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In Ireland, May bushes are decorated on May Day or May Eve — April 30 — with fresh flowers, ribbons, and painted eggshells saved from Easter. Typically, either a hawthorn or gorse is chosen as the shrub of honour, since both plants flower in the month of May. According to Irish folklorists Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert, authors of The May Bush in County Wexford, May Day — called Bealtaine in Gaelic — was a "turning point in the year when 'the fairies' were out." It was also the beginning of the growing season, when it was critical to protect newborn livestock and recently sown crops. The May bush was intended to keep the fae folk, witches, and anything else that might harm the coming year's harvest away from the homestead. Roman Catholicism, the dominant faith in southeast Ireland, took a different approach to these May festivities than England's Puritans. Instead of forbidding them, the church absorbed them. At the end of the 18th century, frustrated by the misbehaviour of his students, Jesuit Father Latomia in Rome decreed that the month of May should be devoted to the Virgin Mary as a way to encourage chastity and virtue. This May observance soon spread to Roman Catholic parishes around the world. In both Ireland and Newfoundland, Catholics set up May altars to Mary in their homes. Mary became the true queen of the May, and the local May queen merely her representative on Earth. At St. Bride's College (Littledale) in St. John's, students even chose a "Mary" instead of a May queen to lead their May procession. Image | May bush Newfoundland Caption: Mike O'Rourke and his Labrador retriever, Lucky, stand alongside his May bush in Outer Cove. (Submitted by Lara Maynard) Open Image in New Tab In Newfoundland communities like Torbay, Middle Cove, Riverhead and Point Lance, the May bush also became consecrated to Mary. May bushes were decorated specifically in blue, a colour that's been associated with the Virgin since at least the sixth century, and a statue of Mary was occasionally set up alongside them. While the traditional Newfoundland May bush was an evergreen stripped of its lower limbs and tied to a fence post to keep it upright, today some prefer to simply decorate a living tree or shrub in their yard, and the candles that once adorned some Irish May bushes have been replaced by fairy lights. Come June, May bushes are either taken down or their blue ribbons are replaced with red ones, transforming the "May tree" into a "June tree" in honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In Roman Catholicism, June is the month and red the colour of the Sacred Heart, which represents Jesus' love for humanity. Image | May bush Newfoundland Caption: Gertie Power of Flatrock put up a May bush every year in honour of her late husband Bernard, who had maintained the tradition faithfully until his death. Here, Gertie is pictured with neighbour Jenny Naish. (Submitted by Philip Hiscock) Open Image in New Tab According to researcher Lara Maynard, May bushes here were once erected for luck like they were in Ireland, but the custom is kept alive today mostly as a religious observance or family tradition. Perhaps that's because, in Newfoundland, May Day is still a bit early to be thinking about agriculture and the safety of the next year's harvest. Seeds shouldn't be sown outdoors until late May or June, so May 1 can hardly be called the beginning of summer. Based on the weather we've had in April, we'll be lucky if it doesn't snow this May. But, if it does, our local May bush tradition has a solution: at the end of the month, you can burn the bush in your wood stove for heat.
CBC
17-03-2025
- CBC
A St. Patrick's Day Irish language lesson
Gearóid Ó Treasaigh from Galway, Ireland, is in New Brunswick teaching Irish studies at St. Thomas University through the Ireland-Canada University Foundation. He gives CBC TV host Clare MacKenzie a lesson in Irish greetings.
