Richmond, Now and Then by Nick Fonda

Author:Nick Fonda
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77186-131-1
Publisher: Baraka Books
Published: 2017-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Remembering Father Quinn

Patrick Quinn was born on February 20, 1836. He was one of two boys in a bevy of five children born to James Quinn and Peggy Lyon. The Quinns lived in Strokestown, in the county of Roscommon, a part of Ireland that, in the early 1840s, was particularly devastated by the Great Famine.

As did so many others, the Quinns left Ireland for Canada in the hope of a better life. The family arrived at the quarantine station on Grosse Île in the summer of 1847, but only eleven year-old Patrick and his younger brother, Thomas, ever made it to the Canadian mainland. The boys’ parents and three sisters died of typhus.

The orphan brothers were adopted by the Bourke family in Nicolet. Both boys went on to study at the seminary in Nicolet and both went on to be ordained into the priesthood. The brothers remained geographically close for the rest of their lives: Five years after Patrick was appointed to Richmond, Thomas became the parish priest in St. Fulgence in South Durham—less than a twenty-minute train ride from his brother’s parish.

Patrick Quinn was ordained in 1862, when he was twenty-six years old. His first assignment was to St. André’s parish in Acton Vale, where he served as a curate. Then, in 1864, he was made parish priest at St. Bibiane’s, in Richmond, where he remained for the rest of his life. That Father Quinn became a parish priest at the age of twenty-eight should be noted. The Catholic Church in the nineteenth century had its pick of the best and the brightest; there was no higher calling than the priesthood. And, at least within the Catholic community, there was no higher authority than the parish priest.

(The role played and the prestige enjoyed by the village priest is reflected in the rectories still standing beside Catholic churches. Rarely is the house of the village priest not the grandest in the village.)

When Father Quinn moved from Acton Vale to Richmond, a forty-minute train ride in 1864, the town he arrived in looked nothing at all as it does today. For one thing, Richmond was two villages and not one town. A gazetteer published in 1873 lists Richmond East with a population of seven hundred and fifteen and Richmond Station with a population of three hundred. Each village had its own post office and, according to the gazetteer, both were “thriving.”

Richmond East had grown up around Cushing Brook, a small stream (now flowing its last few hundred metres through a culvert under streets and parking lots) that spilled into the St. Francis near the Mackenzie Bridge.

Growth along the riverfront had been largely to the south of that stream, at least in part because the first bridge in the area (and the second bridge built across the St. Francis River) was erected about half a mile south of Cushing Brook.

Today, someone starting at the east abutment of the Mackenzie Bridge and travelling south on Main Street can count on one hand

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