Announcement of the building of a new wing of the Hotel Dieu, soliciting donations and listing donors to date.
This first expansion to the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston, was begun in the summer of 1847 and put into use before its completion in 1848.
The expansion of the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston was first discussed in January of 1846. Captain Matthew Hunter, the president of the Sailor’s Society and secretary-treasurer of the Seamen’s Association, approached the Sisters and proposed that a two-storey expansion to be built to care for sick and injured sailors.
The project was delayed and, to ensure that the building progressed, the Vicar General, Angus Macdonell, offered to supervise the work himself. He suggested that a third storey be added to care for infirm clergy and students of Regiopolis College. He gave the land, Lot 10, which was willed to him by his uncle, the first Bishop of Kingston, Alexander Macdonell, and funds were raised in Kingston, Montreal, and Cornwall to supplement Captain Hunter’s original donation.
The area for the foundation was excavated but construction was not begun until the summer of 1847. The building, at 227 Brock Street and later known as the Sydenham Street Apartments, remained unfinished into 1848 but was immediately put to use to house orphans of the 1847 typhus epidemic.
RHSJ Sisters tending to the Irish immigrants on the shore of Lake Ontario in 1847
Letter of permission from Bishop Phelan allowing the RHSJ to treat the sick at the "English hospital" (2 July 1847)
The Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston was barely established for two years when thousands of Irish immigrants, fleeing the Great Famine, landed on the shores of the town in the summer of 1847. The terrible conditions on the ships, on top of the deprivations they fled in Ireland, left many malnourished and ill.
Typhus was endemic and spread quickly among those on the cramped ships and sheds were erected on the shores of Lake Ontario near the Kingston General Hospital to quarintine the sick. The Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph were asked by the civic government to take a major role in responding to the influx of sick people and Bishop Phelan granted the Sisters permission to break cloister to tend to the ill.
The Sisters worked tirelessly caring for the afflicted. Their hospital, including the unfinished new building, was filled beyond capacity as the disease spread into the town. Two or three Sisters tended to the sick in the quarantine sheds daily, while the remaining Sisters, mostly postulants, cared for those in the hospital. The Sisters were not immune to the disease and all who visited in the sheds contracted the disease over the course of the epidemic, with Sister Mary Magorian, who entered the Hotel Dieu the year prior, succumbing to the illness, dying on December 4th, 1847.
As a result of the widespread illness among the immigrants, many children were left abandoned. On Christmas Eve, 1847, 71 children were brought to the Hotel Dieu Orphanage with more arriving in the following months. The 37 boys and 34 girls ranged in age from a few weeks to 20 years of age.
Extract from the Annals of the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston describing the arrival of orphans on Christmas Eve, 1847.
The Sisters were not prepared to house so many orphans arriving all at once and the children had to sleep two or three to a cot and had to eat in shifts as there was not enough crockery to go around.
The epidemic lasted until the early months of 1848. In total, over 1200 people died from the disease.
231 Brock St., built in late 1848, connected the Monastery and Hospital and housed the Sisters' chapel on the first floor and their novitiate on the second.
In 1848, the Sisters built a house in between their Hospital and Monastery, replacing a covered passageway which they constructed in November 1845. This building housed an enlarged novitiate on the second floor and provided a much larger space for their chapel and choir on the main floor. Their chapel was large enough to allow for members of the public to attend mass with the Sisters.
The first mass was celebrated in their new chapel on Christmas 1848.
Payment schedule for the carpentry work to be done on the new wing for the Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston (24 Nay 1869)
235 Brock Street, 1869, designed by architect John Bowes of Ottawa
With the completion of both the 227 and 231 Brock Street buildings by the end of 1848, the number of beds in the hospital had grown from the initial 8 to between 12 and 16 and they could accomodate 25 professed and novice sisters.
The condition of the monastery building the RHSJs moved into in 1845, however, had deteriorated over time and by the late 1860s the Sisters’ doctor, Dr. Michael Sullivan, stated that the “unsanitary, unhealthy environment” of the convent was responsible for the deaths of six young Sisters over the course of a few years.
He led the campaign to raise funds for a new convent building and in 1869 the Ottawa architect John Bowes was engaged to draw up plans, which he did for free. A builder and a carpenter were engaged and work started on May 31st, 1869 and it was completed in December, with the Sisters moving into their new home on December 13th.
The RHSJs now occupied five buildings on four city lots but they would soon need to expand again.
