The Frewyn Music Project and the Great #Montreal #Songbook

While we're preparing for the debut of the Frewyn Music Project, there is another collaboration with
the talented Noah Tolhurst (Stillbuster, 2018) on the horizon: the Great Montreal Songbook, an opus cataloguing the history of Montreal through song. So you won't cry about having to wait too long, here is one of the songs from the album about the famous stone that was erected to commemorate the thousands of Irish immigrants who died from typhus:


The Walk of the Stone - An Charraig Dubh
by Michelle Franklin

March, 1848

A bishop and servant under God’s aegis
I write to you now of the horrors I witnessed
The burgeoning of the tide that brought six thousand
Men, women, and children from the island abroad.
They arrived on the banks of the St. Laurence
In dismal droves, they quitted the ships,
With hunger in their mouths and hope in their hearts.
Though the famine wracked their fail frames,
a greater threat plagues the ships that brought them.
May God support you under your share
When I tell you of the egregious loss of life.
The typhus that took husbands from wives
The violent fevers that made many orphans
The Grey Nuns came to clothe and clean them
The Mohawk came bearing food to feed them
But desperate hands cling to dying fingers,
The moribund resigning to fits of disease
Are awarded with the ease of death.
They leave behind a generation misplaced
If we cannot act quickly for their sake
Lest they linger too long alone
And harbour an indifferent state.
Victoriatown is under my providence
But even now, more fever ships approach
And the children are a most piteous sight.
The Lord has already welcomed our laymen
And taken my priests and nuns into His Arms.
I charge you now, by the Grace of God,
To find for these children a loving home
And ask that our neighbours open their doors
“Receive them without considering them a burden,
“Charity has merit when done in selflessness.”
I beg you, accept these wretched children.
They “gaze up in hopes of being chosen,”
“By all that is good, meet them with joy,
as would that men should do to you.”
The bishop’s call was answered
Those from Goose Village came in haste
Windmill Point relieved of its burden
And every child who lived by the fever
Was claimed by English and French custom
But the dead must be disposed of quickly
Their names inhumed with the ash
And buried in silence under the black stone
Remembered by the workmen of the bridge.
“Their children brought up in our midst
were made as common among us.”
We know them by the names they cherished
Despite the indignity of their birth.
St. Gabriel now shepherds the Point
Victoria’s sentries, asleep at their posts,
preside over the grave marked by the rock
To hail decedents of the diseased
Who still accomplish the walk of the stone