Montreal Irish ghetto during its "Golden Age": Griffintown was the Irish working class neighborhood near the old port and Lachine Canal. The canal was first dug in 1925-26 mostly by the Irish workers who dug the canal to bypass the St. Lawrence rapids (photo credit: public domain)
Griffintown today is a disaster. Few visitors to these desolate and cold streets of Montreal can even imagine that the area used to be the very heart of a vibrant Irish working class community called Griffintown. A community that has marked life in Montreal, Quebec and Canada and its sad decline and the eventual death. A recently published book, An Irish Heart by Dreidger makes it clear that knowing and understanding Griffintown means recognizing the hardships, failures, successes and the enormous challenges faced by waves of Irish immigrants and their descendants in their quest to build a brighter future for themselves and their families. And they did survive and thrive against all odds.
(image - Griffintown, Montreal 1896)
Digging the Lachine Canal to bypass the St Lawrence rapids. The Irish emigrants excelled in digging and the mega project provided jobs the the unskilled emigrants. The Lachine Canal, built in 1823, enlarged in 1843-48, then again 1873-74, enabled shippers to bypass the rapids along the St. Lawrence River.
The emigration of the Irish to Canada can be traced to way before the first macabre famine ships started to bring their human cargo to North America in 1847. It is therefore a misconception to assume that the first Irishmen were necessarily catholic or poor. Some Irishmen had arrived as early as in the early 1600’s, while others later had established fishing and trading communities in the Maritimes and the St. Lawrence estuary. The final decades of the 18th century had seen a number of Protestant Irishmen from the mostly Northern Counties (Modern Northern Ireland): Ulster Scots, Calvinist Presbyterians and others Protestant groups, who were themselves under some pressure from the official Anglican Church in Ireland. They had chosen to leave Ireland, despite their privileged position as opposed to the suppressed and dispossessed Catholics.
The emigration of the Irish to Canada can be traced to way before the first macabre famine ships started to bring their human cargo to North America in 1847. It is therefore a misconception to assume that the first Irishmen were necessarily catholic or poor. Some Irishmen had arrived as early as in the early 1600’s, while others later had established fishing and trading communities in the Maritimes and the St. Lawrence estuary. The final decades of the 18th century had seen a number of Protestant Irishmen from the mostly Northern Counties (Modern Northern Ireland): Ulster Scots, Calvinist Presbyterians and others Protestant groups, who were themselves under some pressure from the official Anglican Church in Ireland. They had chosen to leave Ireland, despite their privileged position as opposed to the suppressed and dispossessed Catholics.
Grosse Ile was a quarantine, where thousands of famine emigrants were processed and thousands more died from hunger, typhus and cholera as they arrived from Ireland. The dead were buried on this tiny island in the St Lawrence estuary, 30 km east of Quebec. Countless others died on the coffin ships and the corpses thrown to the sea. Photo depicts the religious ceremony at the inauguration of the Celtic cross in 1909, celebrated in the 1847 cemetery.
