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What if thousands of people lay dying on Montreal’s waterfront?

What if some of the city’s best doctors, nurses, members of the clergy and the mayor were caring for the sick newcomers at the risk of their own lives?

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What if the dead were being buried in hastily dug trenches next to the makeshift hospital, piled three coffins deep?

What if the death toll rose to the equivalent of 12 per cent of the city’s population?

You’d think a city couldn’t forget a thing like that.

The events of Black 47 are very real to Montreal-born, Dublin-based historian Jason King. On visits to his hometown, King, academic coordinator for the Irish Heritage Trust, which operates the Irish National Famine Museum, always makes a point of visiting the site in Pointe-St-Charles where as many as 6,000 people died of typhus in 1847.

You pass under a railway bridge, past a Costco store, derelict warehouses and empty parking lots bordered by concrete blocks. It’s easy to miss the monument to the typhus victims — a rough boulder in the median between traffic lanes on Bridge St., near the Victoria Bridge. On it are inscribed the words: