Most stories about the Great Hunger end at the dock: the coffin ship, the landfall, the new life. The talk coming to Middletown on Tuesday, October 20, begins where those stories usually stop. Before many Irish Famine immigrants ever set foot on the mainland of North America, they were held on islands — Staten Island, Grosse Île, Deer Island — in quarantine stations and fever hospitals, and some of them never left. They died there and are buried there still.
Loretto Horrigan Leary, an Irish historian, researcher and freelance journalist, will give that lecture at the Wyndham Newport Hotel, 240 Aquidneck Avenue, as the second installment of the Museum of Newport Irish History's 25th Annual Lecture Series. The talk runs from 6 to 7 p.m., with doors opening at 5:30, and a question-and-answer session afterward. It is also being live-streamed over Zoom. In-person admission is $10, cash or check at the door, and includes light hors d'oeuvres, with a cash bar available; the Zoom option is free. Reservations are required either way, made through the museum's website, and questions can go to Ann Arnold at (401) 841-5493 or (917) 270-3372.
The subject is one Leary has spent years on. She is a PhD student in history at Trinity College Dublin, researching sites of collective memory associated with the Great Irish Famine in North America, with a particular focus on Staten Island's burial grounds. Her work has appeared in History Ireland — her article "Irish Domestic Servants and the Making of Gilded Age America" ran in the September/October 2026 issue — as well as the Irish Examiner USA, Irish Central, Celtic Life International, Australia's Irish Scene and The Connacht Tribune. In 2026 she created a free online course, "The Great Irish Famine: History, Diaspora, and Global Legacy," and she serves as co-chair of the Connecticut–Ireland Trade Commission.
The Staten Island ground she studies has a story of its own, and it is the kind of story that makes the lecture more than an academic exercise. New York's first quarantine station opened on Governors Island in 1794, during a yellow fever crisis; in 1799 it moved to a thirty-acre site at Tompkinsville, present-day St. George, on Staten Island, taken by eminent domain over the protests of local residents. There the Marine Hospital and Quarantine Station grew into a complex that included St. Nicholas Hospital, a 300-foot building topped by an observatory crowned with a statue of a sailor, along with a smallpox hospital and a female hospital facing the bay. When Famine ships began arriving in the late 1840s, the station became the first American ground many starving and fever-stricken passengers touched.
Much of what happened there was forgotten, then partly recovered by accident. When construction began on a new courthouse at St. George in 2001, human remains were found beneath the grounds. Eighty-three individuals were eventually excavated, and in 2014 they were reinterred close to where they had originally been buried. On September 20, 2026, a Staten Island Irish Famine Monument and a Global Famine Way bronze shoe memorial were unveiled in St. George, organized by the Staten Island Famine Committee, with Ireland's ambassador to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason, among the speakers. Leary wrote afterward that the ambassador spoke of the "cataclysmic famine that drove many to the coffin ships," while also honoring the survivors. Leary's own connection to the site is direct: the history is bound up with her doctoral research, and she has credited Lynn Rogers and the Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries of Staten Island, along with the committee, for keeping the burial ground from remaining invisible in the public landscape.
Staten Island was one node in a network. At Grosse Île, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, all ships bound for Quebec were required to stop. The island had handled epidemics before — in 1830 some 30,000 immigrants arrived in Quebec, two-thirds of them Irish, during cholera outbreaks in Britain and Europe — but nothing prepared it for 1847. The first Famine ship arrived on May 17, with ice still an inch thick on the river; of its 241 passengers, 84 had fever and nine had died aboard. The hospital was equipped for 150 fever cases. Roughly 100,000 Irish traveled to Grosse Île that year, and it is believed that more than 3,000 died on the island, with over 5,000 buried in its cemetery.
Boston's version was Deer Island, in the harbor. In 1847 alone some 47,000 Irish arrived in Boston, and the island was converted into a makeshift quarantine station and hospital. Between 1847 and 1850 roughly 4,800 people were admitted and about 850 died and were buried there. As in Staten Island, the dead resurfaced in the modern era: bones of those interred at Rest Haven Cemetery were inadvertently uncovered in 1990 during construction of the wastewater facility that now occupies the island. A permanent memorial, centered on a Celtic cross, was unveiled on May 25, 2019, after a campaign nearly forty years in the making, with Cardinal Seán O'Malley and then-Mayor Marty Walsh among the speakers.
What Leary's lecture does with these places is treat them as human experience rather than administrative history — hunger, disease, survival, public fear and memory, from overcrowded ships to quarantine wards to mass graves. The framing in the museum's announcement is that the Great Hunger did not end when the ships made land; it was, in their words, a hunger to survive on foreign shores, and it persisted across the Atlantic.
That framing has local resonance in Newport, where the museum sits in the heart of the Fifth Ward, the city's best-known Irish-American neighborhood, and tells the story of Irish immigration to Newport County from the colonial era to the present. The lecture series is now in its twenty-fifth year, and the venue has been a steady home for it; the previous season's final talk, on Ireland's Blasket Islands, was also held at the Wyndham Newport Hotel and streamed online. The series' format — a modest door fee, a cash bar, a scholar willing to take questions — is the kind of public history that depends on people showing up.
For anyone who wants to, the showing up can be done from a laptop. The Zoom registration is free, which means the talk is accessible to anyone with an interest in the subject and an hour on a Tuesday evening, whether or not they can get to Aquidneck Avenue. Reservations for both the in-person and virtual versions are required and are made through the Museum of Newport Irish History's website.