Article content

MONTREAL — While Montreal is generally viewed as a mixture of British and French influences, look closely enough and you’ll see the Irish have left their mark — including the 6,000 who lay buried in unmarked graves in the city’s Sud-ouest neighbourhood.

In 1847, they came across the ocean on overcrowded ships in the hopes of a new life, but instead many collapsed and died near where they disembarked on the shores of the St. Lawrence River in almost two dozen fever sheds erected to contain the typhus epidemic.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Montreal plans to honour Irish famine victims who came to the city in 1847 Back to video

Their bones are still believed to be scattered there, under parking lots, a railway line, and at the foot of the Black Rock — a three-metre tall boulder erected in 1859 in their memory, which currently sits in a median between four lanes of traffic.

For over a decade, Montreal’s Irish community has lobbied authorities for a park on the spot to serve as a more fitting memorial for the stone and the bones it guards, which historians believe to be the first-ever memorial to those affected by the potato famine, and the biggest Irish gravesite outside Ireland.