The city shaped by Famine ships, Catholic parishes, and Irish Labour
Toronto has a deeper Irish connection than most Canadians realise. In the summer of 1847, at the height of the Great Famine, Toronto received more Irish Famine refugees per capita than any city in North America — including Boston and New York. The Famine ships that anchored at the Toronto waterfront changed the city permanently. The Irish who survived that crossing built Toronto's streets, its churches, its labour movement, and its Catholic school system. Their descendants live in every corner of the city today.
Toronto's original Irish working-class neighbourhood — the area of Cabbages planted by Famine emigrants in front-garden plots that gave the suburb its enduring name.
The Junction's slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants drew Irish immigrant labour from the 1870s onward. The district's Catholic parishes anchored a working-class community for a century.
Toronto's original Irish quarter — the area west of the old city where Famine survivors first settled in the 1840s and built the institutional infrastructure of Irish Catholic Toronto.
In the summer of 1847 — Black '47, the worst year of the Great Famine — approximately 38,000 Irish Famine survivors arrived in Toronto. The city's total population at the time was only about 20,000. It was the largest single influx of refugees in Canadian history, and Toronto was utterly unprepared for it.
The ships that brought them were the notorious "coffin ships" — overcrowded, disease-ridden vessels on which typhus spread rapidly in the holds. Many emigrants arrived already sick. The Toronto waterfront became a medical emergency. Fever sheds were hastily erected, and the Bishop of Toronto, Michael Power, died of typhus contracted while ministering to the sick Irish. Over 1,000 Famine Irish died in Toronto in that single summer and are buried in a mass grave at the Irish Famine Memorial in Toronto.
The survivors of Black '47 were the founders of modern Irish-Catholic Toronto. They arrived with nothing and built everything: the parishes, the schools, the hospitals, the political organisations, and the cultural institutions of one of North America's great Irish communities.
Love Ireland reaches 64,000 subscribers across the Irish diaspora — with deep dives into Irish history, culture, and the communities built by Irish emigrants from Toronto to Melbourne.
Subscribe Free →Tracing your Toronto Irish ancestors? Our free tools can help.