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By year's end, 1,100 migrants had died and were buried in Toronto, either in the plots set aside by St. James Anglican Cathedral, or in the graveyard adjoining St. Paul's Roman Catholic Parish.
Particularly gripping is the story of the Willis family of Limerick. Both parents and five children boarded the Jessie at Limerick, with 482 other passengers on April 18, 1847. Before the ship sailed one son fell ill and had to be left in Limerick. After departing Ireland, the ship spent 56 days on the Atlantic during which time twenty-six people died, including the Willis' eighteen year old son, and their ten year old daughter, Martha. When the ship arrived at Grosse Ile, in June and spent thirteen days in quarantine, another daughter, Mary Willis, age seventeen, was removed to the lazorettos of the island, where she later died. The remaining three members of the Willis family landed at Quebec, June 26, and proceeded inland to Toronto, where they were quickly dispatched inland. They proceeded by road to Brantford, in the London District, where both the father and the remaining son died of fever, leaving only the mother, under the watchful eye of the local Anglican minister, the Reverend Jams Campbell Usher. Stories like those of the Willis family were common, although the names of many have been lost because of the expeditious ways in which names were recorded during the crisis, and the loss of records over the past century and one half. We have a better sense of the more famous victims, Dr George Grassett and Bishop Michael Power, who died after having contracted typhus from persons to whom he was ministering at the Emigrant Hospital and Sheds. Similarly, in November, Edward McElderry, the emigration agent who had met all incoming Irish refugees at Reese's Wharf, died of the dreaded fever.
Apart from stories of individual courage and altruism, the experience of the famine migration to Toronto was not without its controversies. Local politicians and civic officials, enmeshed in the tight webs of patronage and cronyism endemic in colonial politics, were not above securing their own profits in the midst of the crisis. A relative of the Mayor, Henry John Boulton, was able to rent some of his own properties on King Street in order to expand the Emigrant Hospital. John Ritchey, a former city alderman, land owner, and colleague of Boulton and Gurnett, was able to secure all of the contracts for the building of the hospital sheds; Ritchey secured $250 each for the shed his men constructed. The summer of 1847 also witnessed public scandal, when physicians at the Emigrant Hospital and the Board of Health used the pages of the local newspapers to air their differences over how migrants, stricken with fever, ought to be medicated. Rumours also circulated that hospital workers were drinking or re-selling the wine supplies that were intended to help restore health to the fever victims. Even Constable John Townsend was not beyond suspicion. In early August, a routine inspection of the fever sheds and Emigrant Hospital revealed that their were substantially fewer inmates present than he had reported. Had the operators of the hospital inflated the numbers of sick in order to maximize the Government's six shillings per diem allocated per patient? In any event, shortly after the shortfall had been explained away-- patients leaving the hospital grounds without detection--Constable Townsend, the Clerk of the Board, published weekly hospital statistics in the Toronto newspapers.
Perhaps the most bizarre of all the controversies took place in August, when a hearse being driven by an employee of Thomas Ryan, the Catholic undertaker, broke down en route to St. Paul's Cemetery. A coffin came hurling off the wagon and smashed in the middle of King Street. The onlookers were horrified when two bodies spilled out of what was, by law, supposed to be a casket built for a single corpse! The regulations regarding the burial of the dead had been quite explicit. Bodies were removed from the "dead house" at the Emigrant hospital and would each have their own coffin. Thomas Ryan had been awarded the contract for burying the Catholic dead, while H. B. Williams was commissioned to handle the arrangements for Protestants and Anglicans. Ryan would have to pay ten shillings per internment at St. Paul's, which suggests that either Ryan was saving expenses on burials (having knowingly packed-in two bodies), or the hospital staff was shortchanging Ryan by saving the expenses on the extra body, and thereby underestimating the number of coffins "released" which would ultimately allow them to retain the Government's per diem for a person who was dead, but not recorded as such. Whatever the case, whether hospital workers or Ryan were culpable or not, the local Irish newspaper, The Mirror, claimed that the local relief workers were corrupt; these charges were neither substantiated in further reports nor taken to court..
Conclusion
When the final reports on the tragedy of 1847 in Toronto were issued, in early 1848, the staggering toll of the "year of the Irish" was graphically revealed. Nearly 1,100 of the 38,560 migrants died and were buried in Toronto. Three in every four were Roman Catholic, marking a striking changed to the nature of Irish migration to Upper Canada, which up until that year had been primarily Protestant. In February, the British Colonist reported that 757 Irish were buried in the Catholic Cemetery, 305 were buried at St. James Anglican Cemetery, and 50 persons were buried in the Potter's Field of York County. With the memory of sickness and death behind them, local politicians began to prepare for the coming season and made ready petitions that their province no longer be considered by the British as Ireland's graveyard. Their fears did not materialize, since migrants from Ireland, in 1848, preferred travel to the tidewater ports in the United States.
If the psychological impact on the Famine migration to Toronto had been poignant, the actual demographic change to the city had been far less than popular mythology has indicated. By 1848, 35, 650 of the migrants have moved beyond Toronto in search of family, relatives, and work in either British North America or the United States. Aside from the 1005 immigrants still housed in the Emigrant Hospital, Fever Sheds, Convalescent Hospital, and Orphan's Asylum, The Globe reported that only 781 migrants from "Black '47" had taken up lodgings in the city. Although several hundred would return to Toronto when job prospects in the countryside proved, unrequited, the Famine migration did not have a significant permanent effect on Toronto's civic landscape. In time, those Irish who wandered back to the city would be stigmatized as lazy, ignorant, bellicose, and intemperate paupers, in 1848, the city witnessed no immediate stresses for housing and experienced no undue population congestion.
The most striking residual effect of "Black '47", however, was the manner in which the local population would thereafter view all Irish through the single lens of this tragic moment. There would be no mistaking the hostility of locals to the Irish, whom they deemed more as a problem and an impediment to progress, than as a blessing to their community. A decade later The Globe tipped into the local Irish Catholic community exclaiming: "Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, and they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident, and unthankful; they fill our poorhouses and our prisons, and are as brutish in their superstition as Hindoos." The "Famine moment" left similarly powerful impressions upon the local Catholic population. Pre-famine Irish Catholic migrants would come to identify the suffering of their brothers and sisters as a common suffering and, in time, the famine experience would be come the touchstone for Irish identity in central Canada. Given the horrors that had transpired in the homeland, and given the trials of the new world, it is little wonder that the Irish came to see themselves in Canada as a people "more sinned against than sinning." |
