Irish Potato Famine Memorial, West End Cemetery, Portland ME.

Hello again, and welcome. I decided to bring the blog cabin back to the West End and go to an area that I failed to mention earlier, the cemetery. The cemetery is surrounded by the Western Promenade, Vaughan St. and the back sides of houses on Bowdoin St. It was a beautiful site visit painted with red and yellow leaves falling all around me creating the wonderful crunching sounds of fall in Maine. It was a pleasure walking through the old cemetery to observe and snap photos of the often weathered looking grave stones. The cemetery it seems is best entered from Vaughan St. where a small stone archway with benches greets you and leads to one of several gravel paths twisting and turning through the cemetery. The cemetery is relatively small in comparison to some of Portland's other cemeteries like Evergreen, but it is very important to Portland and the West End itself. The West End has a substantial Irish heritage and the cemetery has certain areas with several Irish families and a memorial to victims of the Irish Potato Famine.

The Potato Famine Memorial is a very moving and serious memorial. It is somewhat hidden in the cemetery, shaded and surrounded by needles fallen from the pine trees that circle it. The stone is black with grey engravings. The top reads, "An Gorta Mor 1845-1851" meaning "the great hunger". There is also a picture engraved on the front showing an extremely thin woman with her arms around two malnourished children. The words under the woman and children read, "Sacred to the memory of the Irish who perished during, or fled hunger, disease, an artificial famine and oppressive laws during The Great Hunger in Ireland". The words are very powerful and clearly show the strong Irish heritage that the West End has and wants to preserve. Dedicated to the Early Roman Catholic citizens of Portland, the memorial serves as a physical embodiment of the roots of Irish culture and heritage here in Portland now.
B. Historical Significance.

Sam Shuoe
Libby Bischof
HTY 360
November 2, 2009

Historical Significance of:
The Irish Potato Famine Memorial, West End Portland Me.

Portland Maine has a substantial Irish history that spans to each promenade and beyond. In the 19th century waves of Irish immigrants came to Maine from all over, including Canada, Boston, and as well as directly form Ireland. Often working and living near the shore of Portland, Irish people settled a great deal of the lower West End and even much of Munjoy Hill. The immigration boom that resulted from the potato famine in the 1840’s in Ireland was hard on nearly all of the families arriving in Maine and they made sure never to forget their struggle. These feelings of preservation and remembrance of Irish culture live through to the present, partly as a memorial in honor of those families that was dedicated in 1999 in the heavily Irish populated West End Cemetery.

The Irish population had been growing significantly in Maine by the early 19th century. In a chapter entitled Working Portland: Women, Class, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century by Eileen Eagan which appears in Creating Portland edited by Joseph A. Conforti, Eagan describes early Irish populations booms in Maine. Eagan states, “There were enough Irish in Portland by 1833 for the building of St. Dominic’s-the first Catholic Church in the city-on State Street”(Eagan 194). With a strong Irish population and community forming in Portland, it became a desirable destination for new immigrants swept from their homeland by the famine.

The monument is a powerful black stone with the image of Bridget O’Donnell and her children that was illustrated for the London News on December 22, 1849. The image is a well-known depiction of the famine and engraved on the stone it puts faces to the famine dedication beneath it. Many families fleeing the shores of Ireland for relief from the famine often did not want to leave and therefore upheld a great deal of passion for preserving their Irish heritage and struggle upon arriving in America. The memorial encompasses many aspects of what Irish culture meant in Maine and to the people who lived here because of the famine.

The Potato Famine Memorial is important to Maine history because it helps identify a hugely important culture that shaped Portland's development. Irish Immigrants who were largely Roman Catholic helped shape the working waterfront of Portland and the peninsula's surrounding promenades. Irish immigration in the 19th century in Maine greatly added to the already rich culture and population in Portland, and it is vitally important to remember the struggles that brought such people to the wonderful state of Maine.

Sources:
Eagan, Eileen. Working Portland: Women, Class, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century. Found in Creating Portland, Edited by Joseph A. Conforti. University of New Hampshire Press 2005.