Good Reads - The Flight from Famine

Winner of the 1991 QSPELL Prize for Non-fiction

One of Canada’s founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. 

Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland’s potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. "And that," wrote a Sligo countryman, "was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland."

Flight from Famine is the moving account of a Victorian-era tragedy that has echoes in our own time but seems hardly credible in the light of Ireland’s modern prosperity. 

The famine survivors who helped build Canada in the years that followed Black ’47 provide a testament to courage, resilience, and perseverance. By the time of Confederation, the Irish population of Canada was second only to the French, and four million Canadians can claim proud Irish descent.

Remembering the 4,000 Irish Famine orphans shipped to Australia

After the brutal conditions in the workhouses, life onboard was a significant improvement...more

Black '47 Official Trailer

Great Famine Voices

Why do so many people associate Strokestown with Irish Famine and emigration? The reasons are manifold. In November 1847, at the height of the Great Famine, the landlord of Strokestown Park, Major Denis Mahon, was shot on his way home from Roscommon. Over 100 years later, Major Mahon's ancestor, Olive Parkenham Mahon, sold Strokestown Park to Jim Callery, a local businessman who needed land in the town to expand his thriving business. Although now owner of the house, Jim allowed Olive to remain resident for many years. Jim tells the story much better than I do. He can take over...more

Great Famine Voices

Why do so many people associate Strokestown with Irish Famine and emigration? The reasons are manifold. In November 1847, at the height of the Great Famine, the landlord of Strokestown Park, Major Denis Mahon, was shot on his way home from Roscommon. Over 100 years later, Major Mahon’s ancestor, Olive Pakenham Mahon, sold Strokestown Park to Jim Callery, a local businessman who needed land in the town to expand his thriving business. Although now owner of the house, Jim allowed Olive to remain resident for many years. Jim tells the story much better than I do.He can take over…more

The Past Whispers
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Memorial Stone on Partridge Island, N.B.

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Partridge Island Quarantine Station

The Partridge Island quarantine station was designated a national historic site of Canada in 1974 because of the significant role it played in immigration to Canada, and more specifically to the Maritime Provinces, in the 19th century.


The heritage value of Partridge Island Quarantine Station National Historic Site of Canada lies in its historic role as a 19th-century quarantine station as illustrated by the site, setting and landscape of the island and the quarantine-related remains it contains. Partridge Island was one of two major quarantine stations in 19th-century Canada. 

Established in 1830 to protect Canadian citizens from contagious diseases carried by in-coming ships, the station provided treatment for immigrants and crew members who were ill, as well as purification facilities for the healthy passengers aboard the ships. This station was active during a particularly early and busy period of Canadian immigration. During 1847, 2000 Irish immigrants fleeing from the potato famine were quarantined here during a typhus epidemic. 601 of them are buried in a mass grave on the island. Passengers quarantined on this island eventually settled in New Brunswick, Upper Canada and the United States.


Partridge Island continued to be used as a quarantine station until 1941. It was occupied for the military defence of Saint John during both World Wars, and also used as a light station. All buildings on the island were demolished in 1955 and 1998-1999. Today the site contains remnants of buildings and structures associated with its important role as a 19th-century quarantine station, including those of the doctor’s residence (built ca. 1872), the 2nd class immigrants, marine officers’ and smallpox hospitals (1899-1901), a low water wharf, and a cemetery containing graves from the 1847 typhus epidemic.

Sources: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minutes, May 1974, June 1983, June 1984; Commemorative Integrity Statement, March 2001.


Partridge Island continued to be used as a quarantine station until 1941. It was occupied for the military defence of Saint John during both World Wars, and also used as a light station. All buildings on the island were demolished in 1955 and 1998-1999. Today the site contains remnants of buildings and structures associated with its important role as a 19th-century quarantine station, including those of the doctor’s residence (built ca. 1872), the 2nd class immigrants, marine officers’ and smallpox hospitals (1899-1901), a low water wharf, and a cemetery containing graves from the 1847 typhus epidemic.

 

  

Partridge Island, N.B.

The Celtic Cross Memorial

Partridge Island is a Canadian island located in the Bay of Fundy off the coast of Saint John, New Brunswick within the city's Inner Harbour.

The island is a provincial historic site and was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1974. It lies on the west side of the mouth of the Saint John River
Partridge Island was first established as a quarantine station and pest house in 1785 by the Saint John Royal Charter, which also set aside the island for use as a navigational aids station and a military post. Its first use as a Quarantine Station was not until 1816. A hospital was constructed on the island in 1830.

It received its largest influx of immigrants in the 1840's during the Great Famine, known as the "Irish Potato Famine", when a shortage of potatoes occurred because of potato blight striking Ireland's staple crop, causing millions to starve to death or otherwise emigrate, mainly to North America. During the famine, some 30,000 immigrants were processed by the island's visiting and resident physicians, with 1196 dying at Partridge Island and the adjacent city of Saint John during the Typhus epidemic of 1847. During the 1890's there were over 78,000 immigrants a year being examined or treated on the island.

A memorial to the Irish immigrants of the mid-1840's was set up on the island in the 1890's but by World War One it had deteriorated. In 1926 the Saint John City Cornet Band approached Saint John contractor George McArthur who agreed to lead a campaign to build a suitable monument. The Celtic Cross memorial to the Irish dead of 1847 was dedicated in 1927. 

This was restored and rededicated in 1985. In the early and mid-1980's the Saint John Jewish Community, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Partridge Island Research Project, and the Partridge Island & Harbour Heritage Inc., a company that was registered in 1988 and dissolved in 2004 erected memorials to the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish immigrants buried in one of the six island graveyards, as well as a monument to all of the Irish dead from 1830 to the 1920's.

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Why are 6,000 Irish buried under a Montreal traffic island?

 

The Irish Diaspora Run sees Michael Collins running almost 900km between June 10th and July 10th, from Grosse Île to Toronto, tracing the steps taken by thousands of Irish immigrants who fled the Famine in 1847. This is the second of his weekly updates for The Irish Times.

The most striking fact that emerged from the research I conducted on the passage of some 100,000 who left Ireland aboard the infamous coffin ships in the spring of 1847 was how the municipal authorities, in tandem with the religious orders of Montreal, marshaled their collective resources to care and minister to the sick and dying Irish…more

 

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The Search for Missing Friends

 

I found a book called The Search for Missing Friends, Vol. I I think the price was $3, it’s a fat book, over 600 pages compiling the advertisments placed in the Boston Pilot of Irish immigrants looking for friends and loved ones. Now I see Boston College has inventoried these listings and have placed them in a searchable database.

“THERE WAS A TIDAL WAVE of Irish immigration to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some came to escape political upheaval, famine, and poverty, while others simply hoped to start a better life in the new world. During this time, formal communication was by the written word, but an international postal system was just emerging, making it difficult for those who had immigrated to keep in touch with those they had left behind. The result was that many of those in Ireland had no idea where their relatives and friends might be. Many new Irish Americans simply became “lost” to those who cared for them.”

You may view the database here.

©2016 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
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The Shamrock and the Shield: An Oral History of the Irish in Montreal

 

 

Although there have been some Irish living in Montreal since the early 1600's, augmented by Irish soldiers arriving with the conquering British army, it was only in the early 1800's that an Irish presence was truly noticed.

By 1824 there were sufficient Irish in Montreal to organize the first St. Patrick's Day Parade, and ten years later the St. Patrick's Society was founded. In 1847 St. Patrick's Basilica, Montreal's first church built for the Irish Catholics opened--a year before thousands of sick Irish escaping the famine in Ireland arrived.

 

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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The Graves Are Walking The Great Famine & the Saga of the Irish People

 

 

Deeply researched, compelling in its details, and startling in its conclusions about the appalling decisions behind a tragedy of epic proportions, John Kelly's retelling of the awful story of Ireland's great hunger will resonate today as history that speaks to our own times.

It started in 1845 and before it was over more than one million men, women, and children would die and another two million would flee the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was the worst disaster in the nineteenth century--it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War.

A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and The Graves Are Walking provides fresh material and analysis on the role that Britain's nation-building policies played in exacerbating the devastation by attempting to use the famine to reshape Irish society and character. Religious dogma, anti-relief sentiment, and racial and political ideology combined to result in an almost inconceivable disaster of human suffering.

This is ultimately a story of triumph over perceived destiny: for fifty million Americans of Irish heritage, the saga of a broken people fleeing crushing starvation and remaking themselves in a new land is an inspiring story of revival.

Based on extensive research and written with novelistic flair,The Graves Are Walking draws a portrait that is both intimate and panoramic, that captures the drama of individual lives caught up in an unimaginable tragedy, while imparting a new understanding of the famine's causes and consequences.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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An Irish Heart - How A Small Immigrant Community Shaped Canada

During the Great Famine of the 1840s, thousands of impoverished Irish immigrants, escaping from the potato crop failure, fled to Canada on what came to be known as “fever ships.” As the desperate arrivals landed at Quebec City or nearby Grosse Isle, families were often torn apart. Parents died of typhus and children were put up for adoption, while lucky survivors travelled on to other destinations. Many people made their way up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, where 6,000 more died in appalling conditions.


Despite these terrible beginnings, a thriving Irish settlement called Griffintown was born and endured in Montreal for over a century. The Irish became known for their skill as navvies, building our canals and bridges, working long hours in factories, raising large, close-knit families.
This riveting story captures their strong faith, their dislike of authority, their love of drink, song and a good fight, and their loyalty.

Filled with personal recollections drawn from extensive author interviews, An Irish Heart recreates a community and a culture that has a place of distinction in our history. From D’Arcy McGee and Nellie McClung to the Montreal Shamrocks, Brian Mulroney and beyond, Irish Canadians have made their mark.

Sharon Doyle Driedger, a former senior writer for Maclean’s magazine, was born in Griffintown to a third-generation Irish family. This book grew out of a Maclean’s cover article that had tremendous reader response. Doyle Driedger has won aNational Magazine Award for her writing. She lives in Toronto with her family.

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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Ship Fever

 

The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams.

In “Ship Fever,” the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history’s most tragic epidemics.

In “The English Pupil,” Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach.

And in “The Littoral Zone,” two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it.

In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, “science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material” (Boston Globe).

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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St. Gabriel’s Church (1895)

St. Gabriel’s was the second Irish Catholic church built in Point St. Charles, erected on the site of an older church dating to 1875. As is almost always the case in Montreal, Irish and French-Canadian Catholics, despite their geographic and social proximity, have separate parishes. In 1875, the Irish outnumbered French Canadians in Point St. Charles and for a short time St. Gabriel’s served both linguistic groups.


Destroyed by fire – 1956




St. Gabriel’s today, the steeple was never rebuilt

Over the years the number of English-speaking Catholics in the Point decreased, but many former residents, and in fact many others from the greater Montreal area adopted St Gabriel's as their own. 
The Irish in particular are very fond of the parish. For many years, two Sundays before St Patrick's day, a popular mass of anticipation has been celebrated in the church. And on the last Sunday of May, after Sunday mass, there is a walk from the church to the Stone at the foot of Victoria bridge. It is there that so many Irish, and many French Canadians who cared for them, died of typhus.

Photographs of the fire courtesy - Perry Barton and Carlo Pielroniro



©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
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The Ghosts of Griffintown

Mary Gallagher was a prostitute, brutally murdered on June 26, 1879 at 242 William Street. Soon after, the residence was besieged by neighbours in this Irish community of Griffintown, curious as to what had happened. Now, each and every seven years, a small group of ex-Griffintowners meet at the corner of William and Murray, also curious, to watch for her ghost.


GHOSTS of GRIFFINTOWN is a 63 min. documentary about this haunting and historic area established in 1654 shortly after the founding of Montreal. The fact that de Maisonneuve granted this land to Jeanne Mance because of misappropriated funds was the start of a rocky history. It was always a neglected area with high rents and poor housing, and its share of saints and sinners (as well as floods and fires). But it was also a community of strong people determined to carve out a life for themselves.
Most of the hard work of building the factories, the Lachine canal, the Victoria Bridge, the harbour and the railroads was done by Irish "navvies".

In the 1940s, Griffintown's population started to dwindle as people moved to better neighbourhoods, and by 1970 urban expansion had bulldozed whatever remained... except for the memories.
In GHOSTS of GRIFFINTOWN you will learn of the strong attachment and deep affection people have for the area. You will see how loyalty and a sense of community won out over conditions of poverty. You will hear not only about the ghost of Mary Gallagher but about the ghost of a neighbourhood that just drifted away.
Read about the Ghosts of Griffintown.

Griffontown Remembered

HAPPY FURLONG'S LIFE was saved by a quart of beer. When the elderly carriage driver left his rooming house at the corner of Shannon and Ottawa streets in Montreal's Griffintown shortly after 10 a.m., to buy his favourite ale at the local corner store, he had no idea that an RAF Liberator was about to take off from a supply base in Dorval.

That 25-ton bomber, on a classified mission to Europe on that drizzly spring morning of April 25, 1944, would develop engine trouble as it approached Mount Royal. My uncle, Frank Doyle, then an 11-year-old student in St. Ann's Boys' School, a block from Furlong's flat, remembers how the plane swooped over the school as the pilot made a desperate attempt to reach the river. "We were just coming in after recess," he says. "We heard this big noise, zoom, it shook the place. Brother Edward, our teacher, said, 'Stay here and pray.' " God saved the schoolchildren. The plane missed the school and crashed into the block where Furlong lived. Nine of his neighbours, a beat constable, and the plane's five crew members died.

So the luck of the Irish goes only so far. The plane crash is the worst of many calamities to hit Griffintown. The storied neighbourhood - home to Irish immigrants who fled the potato famines in the 1800s and to several generations of their descendants - has endured floods, fires, riots and strikes. It's a colourful past that has won Griffintown a small, if unhappy, place in the literary imagination…more

Windmill Point

Windmill Point was a quarantine area where between 3,500 and 6,000 Irish immigrants died of typhus or "ship fever" in 1847 and 1848. The immigrants had been transferred from quarantine in Grosse Isle, Quebec.

Due to a lack of suitable preparations, typhus soon reached epidemic proportions in Montreal. Three fever sheds were initially constructed, 150 feet (46 m) long by 40 to 50 feet (15 m) wide. As thousands more sick immigrants landed, more sheds had to be erected.

The number of sheds would grow to 22, with troops cordoning off the area so the sick couldn't escape. Grey Nuns cared for the sick, carrying women and children in their arms from ships to the ambulances.

According to Montreal journalist and historian Edgar Andrew Collard, thirty of 40 nuns who went to help became ill, with seven dying. Other nuns took over, but once the surviving Grey Nuns had convalesced, they returned. Priests also helped, many falling ill after hearing the last confessions of the dying.

When a mob threatened to throw the fever sheds into the river, Montreal mayor John Easton Mills quelled the riot and provided care, giving patients water and changing bedding. He died in November, having served less than a year in office. 


The Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal urged French Quebecers to help their fellow Catholics. Many travelled to Montreal from the countryside to adopt children, in some cases passing their land on to them.

During the mid-19th century, workers constructing the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence River discovered a mass grave in Windmill Pointwhere victims of typhus epidemic of 1847 had been quarantined in fever sheds. The workers, many of whom were of Irish descent, were unsettled by the discovery and wanted to create a memorial to ensure the grave, which held the coffins of 6,000 Irish immigrants, would not be forgotten.

Erected on December 1, 1859, the stone was the first Canadian monument to represent the famine. The inscription on the stone reads:

"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"

 



©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson