The foundation says the land donation by the diocese was key to its goal to transform the area—passed by around 23,000 drivers every day—into a park honouring the thousands of Irish people who died of typhus in 1847 while fleeing Ireland’s Great Famine.
Though the story is a significant chapter in the history of the city, it’s unfamiliar to many Montrealers today.
The Black Rock monument itself was an initiative of Victoria Bridge construction workers, many of them Irish themselves, who removed the boulder from the St. Lawrence River in 1859 and placed it on land after discovering the remains of Irish typhus victims.
Pollution from nearby railroad and vehicle traffic eventually coloured the monument deep black, lending it its name.
The Great Famine claimed around a million victims in Ireland, according to historical estimates. Another million fled the country, including around 100,000 who headed for Canada, then a colony of British North America.
Typhus, a highly contagious disease known at the time as “ship fever,” killed thousands at sea. Some were buried around St. Andrew’s, N.B. Canadian officials intercepted thousands more travellers at Quebec’s Grosse Île, then known as “Quarantine Island” and now a national historic site with over 5,000 graves.
Montreal’s mayor at the time, John Mills, commissioned the construction of more than 20 large “fever shacks” in the Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood, where he and a religious order known as the Grey Nuns led efforts to care for the ill newcomers.
Many of them, including Mayor Mills himself, lost their lives. Some are among the dead buried in the mass grave.
“And let’s not forget that those 6,000 dead left over 1,000 orphans who were adopted by Quebecers, Montrealers and everywhere in the region. The humanitarian action of Montrealers and Quebecers that summer was extraordinary.”
The existence of the mass grave has never been in question, but archaeological digs in conjunction with the construction of a new light-rail train line through the area recently uncovered additional evidence: the remains of 14 people, 10 of them intact. Among them were five adults, two teenagers and three children, the youngest under a year old. The other four people, whose remains were not intact, were two adults and two babies.