We arrived home a couple of weeks ago from a road trip to the East Coast - which was delightful until my husband got ill. We enjoyed our drive along highway 20, stopped to take a tour of Grosse Ile, then a whale-watching tour at Riviere du-Loup, then drove around the entire Gaspe Peninsula, and ended our touring at Moncton.
Grosse Ile was by far the most interesting stop as this is where quarantine of immigrants arriving from Europe first began in 1832 to control the spread of diseases like cholera, smallpox, etc. New buildings and better methods were continually being added for the next 90 years. Grosse Ile is located in the St. Lawrence not far from Quebec City, and was closed in 1937. The island still has a number of buildings from the quarantine days, now run by Parks Canada as a tourist attraction. The most interesting by far is the Quarantine Building which initially used a sulphur fumigator to disinfect all the belongings of immigrants that passed through their quarantine station. In 1898 a new disinfectant came into use, formaldehyde; it was less toxic and did not alter color of clothing. In the same building we found a sample of showers that all immigrants had to use before their disinfected clothes were returned to them. There were 44 of these showers, and all had water jets at three levels.
Of interest also were the three types of hotels to accommodate the healthy passengers during quarantine periods: 1st class; one person per room; 2nd class; 2 to 4 persons per room; and 3rd class would house up to eight people per room. This coincided to the ships' standard of classes. The hotels were in the west sector of the island while the hospitals were in the east sector; they kept them totally separate to keep infections from spreading.
It is estimated that about 7,000 thousand people were buried here - most were Irish immigrants who died of typhus in 1847. These are some of the photos we took during our visit.
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