Migration, Arrival, and Settlement before the Great Famine

Until the late 1820s most Irish Catholic migrants had targeted the Atlantic colonies for sojourning or permanent settlement. Afterwards, however, the employment opportunities available in the interior colonies and the regular shipping traffic between Quebec and such major ports as Dublin and Liverpool stimulated the flow of Irish Catholics down the Saint Lawrence to Lower Canada (Quebec) and beyond the Lachine rapids to Upper Canada (Ontario). In Lower Canada Irish Catholics worked on canal and public-works projects and in the burgeoning forest industry. Irish Catholic farmers were also attracted by the opening of new agricultural areas in the recently surveyed Eastern Townships and in the upper Ottawa valley, in what are now Gatineau and Pontiac counties.

In contrast to the Irish Catholic emigrants in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, who were predominantly from the southeast of Ireland, their counterparts in Lower Canada were a much more diverse lot, coming as they did from major ports such as Dublin or Liverpool. For example, by 1832 most Irish Catholics in Montreal originated in areas above an imaginary line drawn from Drogheda to Sligo. Another important feature of Irish Catholic migration to Lower Canada was its urban focus. Although there were significant pockets of farm settlement, the Irish Catholic in Lower Canada was primarily a town resident. Before the Great Famine migration, Irish Catholics created enclaves in the port cities of Quebec and Montreal. In Quebec, the provincial capital, most Irish Catholics settled in the “Lower Town,” along Champlain Street below the cliffs of the old city and along the banks of the St Charles River, close to the harbour. There they were able to find work in the shipyards and on the wharves. It is estimated that by 1830 Irish Catholics constituted 7,000 of Quebec’s population of 32,000. Not all of these lived in the Lower Town: by 1842 perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the household heads in the electoral district encompassing Quebec’s “Upper Town” were Irish Catholics.

Montreal’s Irish population was considerably more diverse than that of Quebec City. Catholics and Protestants were about equal in number among those Irish who decided to remain in Montreal, a centre of considerable out-migration to Upper Canada and the United States. In 1825 Irish Catholics and Protestants constituted about 3,000 people out of a total city population of 25,000. Irish Catholics in Montreal formed distinctive neighbourhoods in the western portion of the city, below Mount Royal, along Chenneville Street, and later in “Griffin Town,” in what is now St Anne’s Ward. There they were close to the canal works and later the railyards where unskilled and semi-skilled jobs could be found. By the 1840s and 1850s these pre-famine Irish Catholics and their famine-era cousins would also find employment in nearby flour mills, factories, and sugar refineries.

Notable exceptions to the urban focus of the Irish Catholic migration to Lower Canada were the settlements of St Sylvestre and St Patrick at the old seigneury of Beaurivage, in the Beauce region of southeastern Quebec. In the 1820s Irish Catholics moved south of Quebec City along “Craig’s Road” and established themselves as the majority in this region of Lower Canada. Although there was a small Protestant minority consisting of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Methodists, Irish Catholics were clearly the dominant group, so much so that they amounted to double the number of French-Canadian Catholics in Beaurivage. Life in these two Beauce parishes was punctuated by tension, and sometimes open hostility, between the Irish Catholic majority and their anglophone Protestant and francophone Catholic neighbours. By the turn of the century, migration to the region by French-Canadian farmers had reduced Irish Catholic predominance in the region. Other Irish Catholic rural settlements before the famine were located on the Gaspé coast, in the parish of St Patrick outside Quebec and the parish of St Columba on the fertile plain northwest of Montreal, in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier, at Buckingham in the upper Ottawa valley, and near Portage-du-Fort, among other places.