Famine Irish Settlement · The Cabbages in the Gardens · St Paul's Parish · Toronto's Working-Class Heart
Heritage guide for the Irish-Canadian diaspora
| Location | East Toronto, east of Parliament Street, south of Bloor |
| Name origin | Famine Irish grew cabbages in front gardens — 1840s–1850s |
| Peak Irish era | 1847–1920s |
| Origin counties | Cork, Clare, Tipperary, Galway, Roscommon |
| Key parish | St Paul's Basilica, Power Street (established 1822) |
| Famine legacy | Irish Famine Memorial, Ireland Park, Toronto waterfront |
Cabbagetown — today a neighbourhood of Victorian row houses and heritage-listed streets in east Toronto — takes its name from the most direct possible evidence of Irish poverty and Irish self-reliance. When Famine survivors arrived in Toronto in the late 1840s and early 1850s, they planted cabbages in the narrow front gardens of their rented terraces. They planted them because they needed to eat, and cabbages were cheap to grow and nutritious enough to supplement a diet that was otherwise precarious.
The sight of cabbages growing in the front gardens marked the neighbourhood as Irish as clearly as any sign. Wealthier Torontonians, passing through the area, remarked on it. The name stuck — affectionately, mockingly, or simply descriptively depending on who was using it. It became an enduring marker of Irish identity in the east end of Toronto, one that has survived into an era when the original meaning has been entirely forgotten by the neighbourhood's current gentrified residents.
The Famine Irish who planted those cabbages had survived a catastrophe almost without parallel in modern Western history. They arrived in Toronto — many of them sick with ship's fever contracted in the holds of overcrowded vessels — with no money, no property, no connections, and no language advantage (many were Irish-speaking Gaelic speakers with little English). They were the most desperate refugees the city had ever seen.
In 1847 — the worst year of the Great Famine, the year still called Black '47 in Irish folk memory — approximately 38,000 Irish arrived in Toronto. The city's total population was around 20,000. It was an immigration event of extraordinary proportions, and it happened in a matter of months during the shipping season between May and October.
The ships that brought the 1847 emigrants were not emigrant ships but cargo ships — timber vessels returning from the Canadian timber trade that took passengers as a secondary income source. The conditions in the holds were catastrophic. Typhus spread in the overcrowded, unsanitary spaces below decks. By the time ships arrived in Toronto, many passengers were already dying.
The Toronto waterfront in the summer of 1847 was a humanitarian crisis. Fever sheds were erected along the lakeshore to house the sick. Volunteers from the Catholic community — priests, nuns, and laypeople — ministered to the dying. Bishop Michael Power contracted typhus while visiting the fever sheds and died in October 1847. He is buried in St Paul's Basilica on Power Street — the street named after him — in the heart of Cabbagetown.
The 1,120 Famine Irish who died in Toronto in 1847 are commemorated at Ireland Park on the waterfront, a memorial unveiled in 2007 with sculptures by Irish artist Rowan Gillespie. The same artist created the Famine memorial on Custom House Quay in Dublin. The Toronto and Dublin memorials face each other across the Atlantic — one at the departure point, one at a destination.
St Paul's Basilica on Power Street in Cabbagetown is the oldest surviving Catholic church in Toronto, established in 1822 — a generation before the Famine wave. It served the small Irish Catholic community that had existed in Toronto before the Famine, and then, from 1847 onward, it became the spiritual centre of a vastly enlarged community of Famine survivors.
The Catholic community in Toronto in the mid-19th century was almost entirely Irish. The first bishops were Irish-born or Irish-educated. The parishes that spread across the city as it grew were staffed largely by Irish priests and run for Irish congregations. The Catholic school system in Ontario — which survives today as a publicly-funded separate school system — was built and fought for by the Irish Catholic community, led by clergy who understood that educational access was the route from immigrant poverty to professional respectability.
The Orange Order — the Protestant fraternal organisation with deep roots in Ulster — was also very strong in Toronto, and it regularly clashed with the Irish Catholic community. The tensions between Orange and Green in Victorian Toronto were real and sometimes violent. The Jubilee Riots of 1875, sparked by conflict between Orange Order marchers and Catholic Irish, resulted in deaths. Toronto was called "the Belfast of Canada" — and not as a compliment, from either side's perspective.
The Irish Catholic community of Cabbagetown and the surrounding east end was the backbone of Toronto's early labour movement. The trades that the Irish dominated — construction, meatpacking, transport, domestic service — were the trades that organised first. The Nine-Hour Movement of 1872, which led directly to Canada's first labour legislation, had significant Irish Catholic support.
The political expression of the Irish community evolved through the late 19th century from the Irish Catholic vote that supported certain Liberal politicians, to the labour and eventually social-democratic politics of the early 20th century. Irish-Catholic Toronto produced figures like Senator Frank Brady and other labour politicians who shaped the Ontario political landscape in ways that are still visible in the province's political culture.
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