AOH REMEMBERS THE SUMMER OF SORROW AT GROSSE ILE

Children of the Gael
died in their thousands on this island
having fled from the laws of foreign tyrants
and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48.
God's blessing on them.
Let this monument be a token to their name
and honour from the Gaels of America.
God save Ireland.

(A translation of the Irish inscription on the Celtic Cross on Grosse Ile.)

On Saturday August 16, in Quebec City, Quebec province, Canada, close to two thousand people came together under the auspices of the Ancient Order of Hibernians of Canada and the US to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the "Summer of Sorrow," the worst year of An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger), "Black '47." They came to commemorate one of the worst atrocities of that year full of catastrophes for the Irish race: the massive number of deaths at Grosse Ile quarantine station, 30 miles downriver from Quebec City, an island which the Quebecoise have called "Iile des Irlandais" ever since. The weekend also served as a celebration of sorts for the successful efforts of many Irish organizations, spearheaded by "Action Grosse Ile," to force the Canadian government to recognize the special significance of the Irish dimension of the islands history.

As people gathered on the quay in Quebec Saturday morning for the two boats that had been chartered for the trip to Grosse Ile, the skies opened and the umbrellas went up. Many in the crowd commented that somehow the dark wet morning seemed an appropriate beginning for the trip we were about to take; a trip back in time, a trip to a place that was witness to a part of the greatest atrocity that had ever been perpetrated on a European population until the Jewish holocaust of World War II. It might seem a clich, but it really was as if the very sky was weeping for the Children of the Gael on this morning.

As the boats approached the island the first thing that caught the eye of all onboard was the massive Celtic Cross standing over the rock cliffs on the southwest side of the island. This monument, dedicated in 1909 by the AOH, draws the attention of all ships going up or down the St. Lawrence river.

As we disembarked from the ships a piper began to play a sad wailing tune, fitting to the calamity we had come to commemorate. On the island an Ecumenical Service for the souls of the dead was celebrated by Mgr. Andre Gaumond, Catholic Archbishop of Sherbrooke and Rev. Bruce Stavert, Anglican Bishop of Quebec. Rev. Stavert noted that the reaction of the Catholic and Anglican clergy and lay people of the area during the tragedy on Grosse Ile was one of the first examples of ecumenical cooperation.

After the service we were split into smaller groups and escorted around to the various sites on the island: the one remaining fever hospital from 1847 (Lazaretto); the Celtic Cross which was put up by the AOH in 1909; the Doctors Monument; and the most moving site on the island, the mass graves of the victims marked by small white crosses near Cholera Bay.

At the Doctors Monument, on a hillside directly above a mass grave thought to hold over 5,000 bodies, Dr. Michael Quigley, Historian of Action Grosse Ile, told us the story of the Doctors monument and of the poor souls buried nearby. The monument was built in 1848 by Dr. George Douglas, the Medical Superintendent of the island for two doctors who died prior to 1847 and four who died that year, three of them from Quebec and one, Dr. John Benson, from Co. Kilkenny, Ireland.

Dr. Benson arrived at Grosse Ile on the Wandsworth on May 19th and, perhaps because of his experience in fever hospitals in Ireland, he volunteered to help Dr. Douglas treat the sick. Dr. Benson had been evicted from an estate in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. Dr. Quigley observed that the fact that a doctor had been evicted showed, "just how brutal the land relations (in Ireland) were at the time." Dr. Benson contracted typhus almost immediately and died on May 26th, one week after his arrival.

In speaking of the mass graves, Dr. Quigley, pointing out the ridges along the location of the graves, said, "it's hair-raising, how the gravesites replicate the lazy beds of the potatoes in Ireland." Quigley said that by July of '47 Dr. Douglas reported having, "a crew of eight men working dawn until dusk every day digging trenches and burying the dead three deep." By early August Dr. Douglas was forced to import dirt to the rocky island in order to bury any more bodies. In spite of that, rats were coming off the ships to feed on the cadavers. The estimates of the number of deaths on the island in 1847 is placed at a minimum of close to 9,000 and the numbers may have been much higher.

Later as we visited the one fever shed and left from 1847 and walked up the steep hill to get to the location of the impressive Celtic Cross the sky cleared and a bright sun came out. Perhaps the days weather, rainy, cold and miserable, followed by a clear bright sun, was a metaphor for the long journey of the Irish diaspora, from misery and abject poverty to pride and strength. The final ceremony before we left the island was the planting of a tree in honor of the victims of An Gorta Mor by officials of the AOH.

That night in Quebec the AOH organized a Ceili Mor and we celebrated the ultimate triumph of the descendants of those poor, ragged exiles of the Gael. Step dancers entertained, followed by a host of musicians and singers. It was a hooley, grand craic, in the old Irish tradition.

On Sunday morning we assembled at old St. Patrick's church on McMahon St in Quebec. Historian Marianna O'Gallagher told the crowd how the church had been built in 1832 by the Irish who had been gradually coming to Quebec since 1790. She revealed that there had been shelters set up against the side of St. Patricks in 1847. This days ceremonies were dedicated to honoring the people of Quebec, some of whom gave their lives on Grosse Ile, others who welcomed the destitute travelers into their city and still others who took in many of the estimated 2000 orphans of the "Black '47" immigration. Not only were these children taken into the homes of hundreds of Quebecoise, in a gesture that suggests a great sensitivity to how those children came to be orphans, many of them allowed the children to retain their Irish surnames as well , assuring that these names would be signposts of An Gorta Mor among the people of the province.

After dedicating a plaque on St. Patrick's, we marched in procession uphill for four blocks to the Basilica of Notre Dame de Quebec. Within the procession were banners from numerous AOH groups and Irish county associations; one group dressed in black, portraying immigrants from the Hunger years, carrying a sign which said, "Famine Victims Fate" followed by a black coffin. At the Basilica a Solemn High Mass was celebrated by Monsignor Fortier, former Archbishop of Sherbrooke.

Following the mass, the final official activity of the weekend was a Thanksgiving Ceremony in appreciation to the people of Quebec for their kindness to the refugees of 1847 in the court yard of the Petit Seminaire de Quebec next to the Basilica. It had been a weekend to commemorate the suffering of our ancestors and the many untimely deaths visited on them by the vindictive oppressors of our people; but also a time to celebrate the ultimate triumph of those who lived and carried on.

PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS OF THE GROSSE ILE COMMEMORATION

By Joseph Gannon, Managing Editor, The Wild Geese Today

The strongest feeling I am left with from this pilgrimage is that this small plot of land, where so many of our people died and were buried anonymously, is the Auschwitz of the Irish holocaust. Yes, there are many differences, the chief one being that the people running Grosse Ile tried their hardest to save everyone there, unlike the Nazi; but in spite of their heroic efforts the people died in their thousands. Three factors led to the death of those people on Grosse Ile: they were Irish, they were Catholic and they were ruled by the English government, a foreign government that had considered them less than human for hundreds of years. Consider for a moment the reasons the Jews were persecuted and killed during their holocaust; how different are they? During the days of the Penal Laws, an English judge once said, "English law does not recognize that any such person as an Irish-Catholic exists." During the Great Hunger, England proved that racist opinion had not changed.

For an Irish person, this is holy ground, a hallowed place now dedicated to one of the horrors of An Gorta Mor. A place where, unlike so many other abominations of the Hunger, the appalling results of England's 800 year criminal misrule of Ireland, a history which reveals the real cause of the so called "famine," are open and indisputable for any unbiased observer, even an English one such as Cecil Woodham-Smith, to see. The Ulster Plantation system, Oliver Cromwell's land clearances, the Penal Laws, and finally the policies of John Russell and Charles Trevelyan, all led to the Great Hunger and Grosse Ile as surely as Hitler's "Final Solution" led to Jewish Holocaust and Auschwitz. It just took longer.

As I walked over the undulating ground of the mass graves on Grosse Ile, through the rows of plain white crosses, several emotions ran through me . At first there was a profound sadness as I tried to imagine what the last few months of the lives of these men, women and children must have been like. Imagine it if you can, desperately trying to scrape out, not a living, but merely a continuing existence in Ireland; then either by choice (though a coerced choice at best) or as a result of a landlords eviction and clearance; loading onto an overcrowded ship that was never designed to carry passengers; enduring an unspeakable month or more in the horrific environment of a coffin ship, with sick, dead and dying people all around and finally becoming sick yourself, perhaps just as the voyage was about to end, and being sent to the charnel house that was Grosse Ile in the summer of 1847; a place that must have been hell on earth during that "Summer of Sorrow." And the sorrow I felt deepened as I thought what kind, generous people the majority of them had been, living for years in poverty but always sharing with each other the things they had until the day had come when they nothing left to share.

My thoughts then drifted to the people who had been most responsible for this genocide, the ones we can easily identify, at least: John Russell, Charles Trevelyan and few others. The English would put Earl in front of Russell's name and Sir in front of Trevelyan but I believe that, through their actions during the Great Hunger, they abrogated any right to a title. How can a person look at the row on row their victims on Grosse Ile or one of the hundreds of mass graves in Ireland and then call Trevelyan, Sir? As my thoughts drifted to these men my emotions moved away from sorrow and toward anger. The phrases that kept running through my head were, "The bastards, the bastards, the sons of bitches, that did this to our people." These men that had forced our people to die in road side ditches or the black holds of stinking ships; with mouths green from eating grass and bellies swollen from starvation; or to die alone on an island in Canada, some completely nameless; to be thrown into a hole and buried with no one to weep or keen for their passing. "God damn them to Hell," I thought; these men who caused so much pain, anguish and grief and then lived their lives rich and content, well fed on the bounty of Ireland which was denied to the Irish, perhaps to die peacefully in their beds.

But the final emotion that overcame me was caused by what I saw here around me. Yes, many of the people buried in the ground we were walking had died alone and ungrieved at the time, and perhaps those bastards had lived out their lives content in their self-righteous lies. But look now , 150 years later, at the two thousand people who came from hundreds and even thousands of miles, to place flowers reverently on the graves of the victims, to recognize their pain and suffering, to acknowledge their sacrifices and sorrows, and pay tribute to the honor and dignity which they lived and died. Those two thousand people were a living legacy of those victims and millions more prosperous, productive people all over North America and other places in the world are a monument to their refusal to give up in the face of an act of God that was turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

On May 15, 1847, the day she arrived at Grosse Ile, little 4 year old Ellen Kane, of Co. Mayo, became the first victim of the "Summer of Sorrow." What person who knows the real history of the abomination that was the Great Hunger could deny that this small child, and every other victim of An Gorta Mor, possessed more honor, more dignity, more integrity, more simple human decency than all the members of both houses of the English Parliament combined.

Were anyone to attempt to organize a tribute to John Russell or Charles Trevelyan in England today, who would show up. A handful of their descendants perhaps. The people those men scorned and murdered in life are the ones who are honored by millions in Ireland and in the diaspora now, while men like Russell and Trevelyan are forgotten by almost all except those who remember them with contempt.

Because we can bring two thousand people to Grosse Ile on a Saturday in August; because we have made the truth shine through darkness of the lies and coverups of 150 years, the anger left me. The final emotion that came over me as I looked around at the thousands there on Grosse Ile that day was pride in the courage and fortitude of our people 150 years ago and in the fact that we have not forgotten, and we never will. We will no longer be silent and ashamed of the fact that we didn't have the physical power to save ourselves from the ravages of a powerful, heinous government 150 years ago; we will continue to spread the truth of An Gorta Mor. In the end I felt a contentment come over me. Who has won the ultimate victory 150 years later? On the pages of history, Russell and Trevelyan have clearly been defeated by 4 year old Ellen Kane.

MYSTICAL CONNECTION TO A HELL ON EARTH

During the recent AOH Pilgrimage to Grosse Ile I had one of those moments which we Irish who believe in the mystical connection to the Ol' Sod always find fascinating. It happened while I was in the book store on the island looking through "A Register of Deceased Persons at Sea and on Grosse Ile," by Andre Charbonneau and Doris Drolet-Dube. One's first inclination when seeing such a book is, of course, to check for people with your last name, and that's what I did.

To set up the mystical component to this story, I must tell you that I am a Civil War reenactor and often take on the first person character of an Irish-born Union soldier or , less often, a civilian. In concocting a background for Joe Gannon, the Irish immigrant, I always said that I was born near Killala, Co. Mayo. There are certainly thousands of places in Ireland that I could have chosen; I'm not sure why I chose Killala. I suppose I would have said that it was because of the French landing there in '98, which gives me some good stories to tell about it; saying I had a grandfather fight with the French, that he was executed later; Mayo is an area where the effects of the Hunger were terrible, adding that to the tale also.

In this book it showed that seven Gannons had died at sea enroute to Grosse Ile and two more on the island. This fact in itself is significant; it gives a good indication of how wide spread the Hunger deaths were that year. I recently saw a list of the 100 most common Irish names and Gannon is not among them. Yet nine of that name had perished enroute to this one immigrant destination, just in the summer of "Black '47! It was not just this revelation that put a chill through me, however.

Beside the name of each person listed was the name of the ship they sailed on and the port of debarkation. There were many ports listed: Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Liverpool, where thousands from Ireland went first before departing for North America, Derry, Waterford, Cork, and others. So there were numerous possibilities for the debarkation point of each immigrant; and yet, as I looked at the seven Gannons who died at sea, a little chill went quickly up and then down my spine. Four of the seven had departed from Killala! Coincidence? Sure, probably, but ...... then again, who knows.

Were any of them blood relatives? I don't know, no one in my family has done enough genealogy for us to know. But maybe I had hit on one of the reasons there are so many of us outside of Ireland, the children of the diaspora, the lost children of the Gael, who care so deeply about the people and history of that "Holy Ground." People who believe in such things say that the souls of those who are murdered or die horrible deaths are often restless, calling out. If that is so, then surely the dead of An Gorta Mor are crying out. Do many of us hear those voices of 150 years ago? Did the choice of Killala as my fictional hometown come from my own inspiration; or was it from one of those four voices at the bottom of the Atlantic, joined in chorus with dozens more Gannons, at the bottom of the ocean, and in unmarked graves, crying out for home, for Killala; crying out for someone to tell their story?

MARY BRADY: ANOTHER ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD

As the Irish Brigade Association was honoring Civil War nurse,Sister Mary Grant, recently in New York City, another Irish-born "Angel of the Battlefield" was being honored at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. Mary Brady was the wife of prominent attorney there and the founder, together with some of her friends, of the Ladies Association for Soldiers Relief which visited sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals of Philadelphia. Brady would ultimately forfeit her life while selflessly helping men in uniform fighting for the Union.

Brady was 40 years old and the mother of five children when she began her philanthropic work. Not satisfied with helping only the soldiers in Philadelphia, Brady and her friends began to make visits to the field hospitals and camps of the Army of the Potomac to distribute supplies to the soldiers there. Between 1862 and 1864 they made four such visits to the army. During their visits to the field the woman of the Soldiers Relief had numerous gifts presented to them by the grateful soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. These included a Confederate officer's sword and general's insignia which was given to them at Gettysburg.

The commemoration for Brady was organized by the 28th Pennsylvania Historical Society. Project Coordinator Jane Peters of Mount Holly, NJ, spoke at Brady's graveside as did reenactor Capt. Andy Waskie of the 28th Pennsylvania. Wreaths were laid at the gravestone, along with a GAR marker and flag. Music was provided at the graveside by the Libby Prison Minstrels of the Mifflin Guard. In addition to the 28th PA, reenactors from 69th PA, the 12 NJ, and 61st NY were present at the ceremony.

The group, inspired by the book "Woman at Gettysburg" by Eileen Conklin, found four of the nurses she mentions in unmarked graves in the Philadelphia area. They have been following a plan to honor one of these nurses for four straight years. Brady was the third of the four, the last is Mary Lee who is buried in an unmarked grave in Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hills, PA. Anyone wishing to help with this commemoration can send donations to: Jane Peters, 204 Mill St., Mount Holly, NJ 08060.

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