It has taken 172 years, several generations, and a lot of lobbying and hard work from the Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation, and now it appears the city will have an Irish Famine memorial park to honour the memory of the thousands of Irish who died of typhus after leaving Ireland for a better life in Montreal.
When Montreal’s Victoria Bridge was being built between 1854 and 1859, workers discovered a mass grave of thousands of Irish immigrants who died in the fever sheds after being quarantined with typhus. A ten-foot high boulder that had been unearthed during the excavation for the bridge was erected and inscribed in memory of those immigrants who died.
Hydro-Québec, which for more than a year has owned the land where the Irish are thought to have been buried, announced what it will do for a commemorative space at the Black Rock site.
The Black Rock was erected by railway bridge workers in 1859 to honour the 6,000 Irish famine refugees who died of typhus in 1847. They are buried at the site in a mass grave.
When the purchase was announced in 2017, Hydro-Québec promised to dig the area and allocate some space for the park when they built their new substation.
The archeological survey to search for remnants of the so-called “fever sheds” as well as traces of human burials, found only fragments from the era of mass arrivals, such as nails, dishes, and a toy spinning top.
No skeletal remains were discovered.
In yesterday’s announcement, Hydro-Québec provided three options for its new Des Irlandais (Irish) sub-station that included the proposed location of the memorial park. Although hard to see because of the size of the images on the public utility’s website, the light gray zones represent the area that could be devoted to a site to commemorate the Irish victims of typhus.
Right now, the Black Rock is difficult to access because it is in the middle of a busy street.
Thanks to the foundation! We need to remember the vast numbers that suffered, and that crop failure can happen at any time, to any people.