Letters home from the New World

A sense of isolation was felt keenly by the Irish diaspora in the USA in the late 1800s whose sole means of communication was the letter home. Dan Buckley dips in to some of them

TO preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of Ship Fever,” reads the commemoration, chiselled out of bedrock to mark the place where, in 1847, thousands of Irish immigrants drew their last breath while fleeing the ravages of famine at home.

The words are inscribed on The Black Rock, a large, granite boulder perched on a hillock near Goose Village in Montreal, Canada. It was placed there in 1859 as a salute to Irish immigrants whose remains were found during the construction of the city’s Victoria Bridge. The immigrants, quarantined with typhus, known as ship fever, had died in the fever sheds built there to prevent the spread of disease.