Toronto Irish Famine Memorial - June/2007

Click on the title to connect to the Ireland Park Foundation website.
In the summer of 2007, the Irish Park Foundation of Toronto opened
the Irish Famine Memorial at the southeast corner of Bathurst Quay
on Lake Ontario. It’s purpose is to acknowledge and honour the
thousands of Irish immigrants who arrived in Toronto at the peak of
the potato famine in the summer of 1847. At the time, the population
of the city was about 20,000. The newcomers numbered about 39,000.

Almost half a million Irish people had already come to British North
America beginning in the 1790’s. They were the back bone of rural
and urban Upper Canada. However, the ‘Great Famine’ which was
experienced all over Europe, was most seriously felt in Ireland.
Thousands of desperate people looked to escape the horror.

Eleven hundred of the 39,000 who arrived in Toronto that summer
died in ‘fever sheds’ on the harbour because the city couldn’t
accommodate the influx of people and because disease and hunger
were rampant among them. About 75 per cent of the dead were
buried in the Catholic Cemetery, 305 at St. James Anglican
cemetery and the remainder at Potter’s Field (Bloor and Yonge).
Until that time, Irish immigrants to Canada had been primarily
protestant.

Toronto politicians feared that the immigration would continue, but
in 1848, those leaving Ireland chose the United States as their
destination. And most of the immigrants who had arrived the
previous year left Toronto to find work or to be reunited with
other family members elsewhere in British North America or the
United States. It has been estimated that less than one thousand
of the newcomers remained in Toronto permanently. However,
the unfortunate result of the summer of 1847 was that future Irish
immigrants were met with hostility in the city.

To view photos of the Irish Famine Memorial and for further history
of the arrival of the Irish in Toronto in 1847, written by Professor
Mark G. McGowan with Michael Chard, St. Michael's College,
University of Toronto, see the Ireland Park Foundation website -

http://www.irelandparkfoundation.com/index.php