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Over thirty-eight thousand of Irish immigrants disembarked at Toronto in 1847. The vast majority had already passed through Grosse Ile, had taken sailing craft steamers from the Upper St. Lawrence, and then had departed Montreal with the intent to survey settlement possibilities at Kingston, where many elected to board new vessels in order to investigate other Lake Ontario ports. The travel was not without inconvenience. One commentator in Toronto's Globe likened the overcrowding on the lake ships to conditions on board slave ships from Africa to the United States. In the spring of 1847, dozens of passengers who had disembarked in Port Windsor (Whitby), some fifty kilometers east of Toronto, were forced to back track twenty kilometers, by foot, in order to retrieve their baggage, which had been inadvertently deposited at Port Darlington. Those who pressed on to Toronto were required to disembark at Reese's Wharf, near the current site of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre. There they would be processed at a make shift shed by Edward McElderry, the local Emigration Agent and representative of the Government of the Province of Canada (the union of what is now Quebec and Ontario) and Constable John B Townsend, who was the Clerk of the Toronto Board of Health.
Toronto, the former provincial capital of Upper Canada, ceased to hold this civic honour, in 1841, when the Union of the two provinces of Canada came into being. Thereafter the capital would alternate between the provinces until the late 1850s, when the sleepy logging community of Ottawa was selected as the permanent seat of government, to the delight of no one outside of the new capital. Toronto's nearly 15,000 inhabitants lived along dirt (often muddy) thoroughfares in a broad band of wood-frame, brick, and stone houses between the Don River Valley, to the east, and Bathurst Street, to the west. The southern extremity of the city was the bustling harbour on lake Ontario, and the northern limits of settlement were just beyond today's Queen Street. The Mayor of Toronto in 1847, the Honourable William H. Boulton, was aware that the Irish calamity was on its way. As early as February, city council had formed a Board of Public Health, and newspaper reports indicated that the sailing season might bring thousands from Ireland. This advanced warning was confirmed by none other than the city's Catholic Bishop, Michael Power, who had spent the winter and spring of 1847 in Europe. Having returned to London, England, from Ireland, where he saw the devastation of the Famine first-hand, Power issued an Pastoral letter to his diocese on May 13, indicating that the effects of the crop failures was far worse than he anticipated. As early as June, just as the first waves of Irish refugees were venturing into the interior (the first ship from an Irish port to arrive was the Jane Black from Limerick on May 23), Provincial Secretary, Dominic J. Daly, instructed Mayor Boulton to build hospitals and sheds for the migrants, with the promise of reimbursement from the Provincial coffers. Daly was quick to point out in his directives, on June 7, that municipalities would bear the responsibilities for direct aid through their mandated Boards of Health.
The Toronto Board of Health was soon under the firm hand of Alderman George Gurnett, who, on June 23, became its permanent chair. Gurnett and his associates on the Board - Charles Daly, Joseph Workman, MD, J.G. Beard, and Thomas J Preston - would co-ordinate Toronto's immigrant relief efforts including the building and provisioning of "emigrant sheds", the dispensation of appropriate medical care to the sick, and the inspection and triaging of migrants as they arrived at Reese's Wharf. Their mandate came none too soon because on June 8, the City of Toronto dropped anchor at its namesake and proceeded to unload its human cargo of 700 adults and children, of whom 250 (adults) were described as "indigent", having arrived from Kingston at the "expense of the Government". Local journalists were quick to point out these poorer migrants had come from the south and west of Ireland, whereas the remaining150 adults in "good circumstances" were described as having hailed from Northern Ireland and England. This arrival marked the beginning of the surge inland, since prior to June 7, only 2,592 migrants had landed in Toronto, less than seven per cent of the season's total migrants had landed in Toronto. This landing of the sick and indigent was merely a harbinger of worse things to come.
In the month of June the pattern was set for procedures at Reese's Wharf. McElderry and Towsend (and later his assistant, Special Constable Thomas Foster) sent healthy migrants on their way - on to Hamilton, the rural hinterlands around Toronto, or to London, or the neighbouring American states, via Niagara. Many Irish were able to re-establish ties with family and friends who had already settled in Canada over the previous thirty years. In Limerick, for example, local newspapers had contained letters encouraging the region's farmers to join them in Canada. In one such missive, Daniel McNamara exclaimed to his former neighbours in Limerick: "Thank God we have left that miserable country [Ireland] that we are in a good country now, and our children had good health. I have 3s 9d a day and steady work, laying out a new road and levelling hills." Just to make his case stronger, McNamara added that another Limerick County man, Patrick Shine, "is doing well here", and that his daughters have good jobs in Toronto. Most of the 38,560 who would land in Toronto would not stay in the city, seeking out their own Daniel McNamaras and Patrick Shines.
The sick were another matter. By late June it was clear to Toronto officials that ailing migrants were not being held in either Montreal or Kingston and they were being passed on to Toronto, which one local described colourfully as "a general Lazaretto". Local residents and hotels were prohibited from housing any emigrants suspected of carrying disease. Cabs and carters were instructed not to transport any migrants into the city if they appeared ill. The Board of Health upheld a dual mandate: to protect Toronto's citizens from the spread of disease and to support only the migrants who had fallen ill. Townsend's orders were clear: only those emigrants "in the case of sickness ...or special cases as may be sanctioned by the Board of Health" were to be admitted to the sheds. With each passing day in June, and the arrival of hundreds more immigrants, the Board of Health was under increasing pressure to meet the needs of sick migrants and to secure funding for medicines, beds, and enlarged facilities. It was agreed that infectious patients should not be admitted to the General Hospital, for fear of spreading any contagion to the local population. By months' end the General Hospital was relocated from its location at King and John Streets and its former buildings became the temporary home of the Emigrant Hospital. With the sheds on Reese's Wharf, having been found wanting in almost every way, the Board of Health contracted the building of sheds on the grounds of the hospital, initially fifty by 10 feet, open-sided, with two rows of seats, "to protect the emigrants therein from the suns rays". In June and July tenders were advertised for the building of more sheds; by August there were close to 700 patients in the Emigrant Hospital and still others housed in fourteen sheds, most of which exceeded the original sheds in size (75 feet by 20 feet). The crisis in Toronto deepened when, on July 18, George Grassett, the chief medical officer at the Emigrant hospital died of fever, and construction workers building the new sheds lay down their tools, refusing to continue, because several of their number had fallen ill.
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