More bodies discovered at Irish mass grave in Duffy's Cut

'We want to return these poor men home,' says historian

Kelly Fincham and Lauren Carroll,

IrishCentral.com

Published Monday, August 3, 2009, 3:03 PM

Updated Monday, August 3, 2009, 3:26 PM

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The memorial plaque which was put up in 2004

They fled Ireland on board the John Stamp ship from Derry in April 1832 to seek work building the railways in Philadelphia.

Working on the railroads was backbreaking toil in 1832. There was no heavy machinery to lift the steel rails, the wooden sleepers or the ballast bed underneath the tracks. The workers had to lay every foot of track by hand.

And the railroads had to be built quickly. America was in a hurry to expand, so the railroads imported shiploads of cheap labor from Ireland where men were desperate to work at anything. And work they did, from dawn to dusk, in boiling sun or freezing snow.

The John Stamp passengers, who were hired by an Irish contractor called Philip Duffy, never made it to the work force.

By August they were dead. All 57 died within six weeks of arriving in Pennsylvania.

Now, Watson, along with with his brother Dr. Bill Watson and their team of archeologists and historians, hope to finally discover what happened to the men.

Was it cholera? Or were the men murdered near mile 59, which would later come to be known as Duffy's Cut?

Cholera was much feared in the 19th century as it spread like wildfire among the slums and tenements of the immigrant workforce.

But one thing is certain, they were left to die on their own.

In 1832, the Irish were despised for their religion and also because the Protestant Philadelphians believed that the Irish were just not "as human" as the Germans, English, Jews and Welsh people who had settled there.

They were only good for doing work that no respectable "white man" would do.

During the summer of 1832, almost 1,000 people died in Philadelphia from cholera, which in those days had a death rate of about 30 per cent.

The little group of Irish immigrants would see a death toll of 100 per cent.

That statistic alone has given rise to concern that the men were killed by.

Within two years of the tragedy, locals avoided the area and one man was recorded as saying that he could see "the dead Irishmen dancing on their grave."

The Watsons have been carrying out their real-life detective work since 2000 when they inherited a package of papers from their grandfather who worked on the railroad. The papers told how the railroad censored all information about the deaths.

The Watsons started off small but their efforts have won international support.

They discovered the first human remains in 2009 and are now close to uncovering the entire grave.

Indeed, Bill Watson believes that their most recent finding is like "a portal for a mass grave."

Although it remains to be seen whether they can establish the cause of death.

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