Lawrence Stephen McMahon (December 26, 1835 – August 21, 1893) was a Canadian-born American Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Hartford from 1879 until his death in 1893.

[2] When Holy Cross closed in 1852 due to a fire, he traveled to the Collège de Montréal in Montreal in the British Province of Quebec to study rhetoric.

[3] Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Boston had planned to send McMahon to Rome to study at the Pontifical Urban College for the Propagation of the Faith.

McMahon was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Boston in Rome on March 24, 1860, by Cardinal Costantino Patrizi Naro.

In 1862, during the American Civil War, the 28th Massachusetts regiment, an Irish immigrant unit in the Union Army, contacted the archdiocese, asking them to assign a priest as their a chaplain.

Thomas Francis Hendricken, the first bishop of Providence, appointed McMahon as his vicar general.

He hired the architect, Patrick Keely, who had constructed many Catholic churches around the country, along with the sculptor Joseph Sibbel.

[8] During McMahon's 14-year tenure as bishop, many different ethnic groups started arriving in the diocese.

After the cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1958, his remains were re-interred in the Bishop's Plot at Mount St. Benedict Cemetery in Bloomfield, Connecticut.