Cross erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America in
1909, "Sacred to the memory of the thousands of Irish emigrants
who to preserve the faith suffered hunger and exile in 1847-48
and stricken with fever ended here their sorrowful pilgrimage."

In her novel, Away Jane Urquart describes the agony experienced by many of the Irish immigrants passing through the quarantine station at Grosse Ile:

What the child had forgotten and would not remember until years later were the crowded docks of Larne and the journey there, the suffering, starvation, the desperate throngs on the wharf. He had forgotten the dark belly of the ship where no air stirred and, as the weeks passed, the groans of his neighbours, the unbearable, unspeakable odours, his own father calling for water, and the limp bodies of children he had come to know being hoisted through the hatch on ropes, over and over, until the boy believed this to be the method by which one ascended to heaven. He had forgotten his own sickness which drew a dark curtain over the wet, foul timbers of the ship's wall and the long sleep that had removed him from the ravings of the other passengers until he awakened believing that the shrieked requests for air and light and liquid was the voice of the abominable beast, the ship that was devouring a third of the flesh that had poured into its hold. And after ten weeks crouched on end of his parents' birth on The New World, and six weeks confined to a bed with five other children at the quarantine station at Grosse Isle (some lying dead beside him for half a day), he had forgotten how to recall images, engage in conversation, and how to walk. . . . His mother . . . had come looking for him after they had been separated at the quarantine station . . . in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. She had lifted him out of the bed. He had scarcely been out of her arms since" (137-138).

The lazaret, the oldest existing building on the island, was converted
into a hospital along with twelve prefabricated wooden buildings brought
from Quebec in response to the emergency situation in 1847.

The Irish cemetery on the western end of the island was used from 1832 until 1847.
During the emergency coffins were piled three deep in long rectangular trenches.

More than 6000 of the 7480 people buried on Grosse Ile are buried
in the Irish Cemetery. Most of these burials took place in 1847.