‘Our voices will not be silenced': Montreal Irish community remembers 6,000 who died in 1847

Montreal Gazette

26-05-2025

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.