Duffy's Cut

In 1832, Irish immigrant and Willistown railroad contractor Phillip Duffy, while working to build the Philadelphia and Columbia Rail line, went to the docks in Philadelphia and hired 57 Irishmen directly off of a boat from Ireland. To build their lines, Pennsylvania railroads had to tunnel through mountains, cross wide rivers, span deep gorges to lay the track upon which their trains would run. This was hard, physically demanding, low-paying labor and dangerous work. To find men desperate enough to build and maintain their lines, Pennsylvania railroads for generations relied upon foreign workers - Irish and Chinese, and Italians - and slaves from the south.

Duffy brought the men out to the Malvern area to work to fill in a ravine for a track bed. Duffy crowded his work crew into a single hastily built shanty. Largely shunned by the local populace - anti-Irish Catholic riots had broken out in Philadelphia just the year before -the newcomers began their grueling labor in June:

That summer, an outbreak of Cholera swept through the area killing at least 900 in the tri-county area. As they watched their fellow workers fall ill and die, some of the Irish men hurried to nearby homes for assistance. The anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudice was so prevalent, however, that doors were barred tight, and help was refused. Only the blacksmith dared risked exposure in an attempt to save lives.

The Blacksmith led several Sisters of Charity from Philadelphia to the site, but to no avail. The task of burying the Irish workers, who all died from cholera that August, fell upon the blacksmith. There are also theories that some were murdered by anti-Irish vigilantes or even the railroad itself, which the ongoing excavation may prove or disprove. The Blacksmith buried them all in a shallow ditch on the railroad's right of way without ceremony or funeral. Also rejected by the local residents, the nuns walked back to Philadelphia without food or water in the late summer heat.

Although incidents of mass death such as this one at Duffy's Cut were uncommon, Irish immigrant workers on Pennsylvania's railroads suffered from injury and death at a high rate, for they were often viewed by the owners and managers of railroad and coal mining corporations as expendable components, and by "native" Americans as unwholesome and even dangerous outsiders. Often crowded into company housing in out-of-the-way locations, Irish-born mine and rail workers struggled for survival in a frequently hostile environment.

As commerce and industry expanded rapidly in the decades before the Civil War, immigrant workers" efforts fueled Pennsylvania's exploding economic growth. Landless Irish tenant farmers and laborers, dispossessed by the English in their homeland, and then fleeing starvation after the outbreak of the potato famine, fled by the thousands every year. The vast majority wound up in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Some found skilled labor positions, or farming opportunities, ended up doing temporary and arduous hard labor. For those who spoke English or were skilled craftsmen, chances for economic success were greater. Many of these immigrant workers brought with them ideas about labor guilds and fraternities, which would appear in force during the last quarter of the nineteenth century when organized workers challenged the authority of wealthy industrialists. Railroad jobs were be extremely dangerous. In 1881, more than thirty thousand American railroad workers were killed or injured on the job. Many railroads offered no compensation; nor did the courts which ruled that workers shared the blame for their injuries and deaths—even when railroads had the ability to use equipment that would improve safety.

In the late 1800s industrial workers membership in unions in Pennsylvania and across the nation began to afford them some protections against management abuses. But in 1832, the fifty-seven Irish laborers who worked on the Philadelphia and Columbia line were completely on their own. When disease struck, they suffered, and died, alone. No death certificates were ever filed for these non-citizens. Work on Duffy's Cut resumed in the fall.

When the Philadelphia and Columbia was purchased by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1857, the story of Duffy's Cut might have been forgotten had it not been for some local residents who still talked about the gruesome tragedy. In 1870, sympathetic local railroad workers constructed a wooden fence around what they thought was the gravesite. In 1909, a railroad assistant supervisor replaced the deteriorating wooden fence with a stone wall.

Official record of the deaths at Duffy's Cut, remained locked in the vaults of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) until Joseph Tripican, a secretary to a former PRR president removed them after the company's bankruptcy in 1970. In the 1990s, one of Tripican's grandsons, Frank Watson discovered the papers in a file, and began with fellow historian and brother William Watson to research the history. The file had been intentionally hidden by the Railroad from the 1850s until its bankruptcy in the 1970’s.

Professor William Watson of Immaculata University and his dig team, found human bones on the site Friday March 20th. William is a brother Hibernian, a member of Black Jack Kehoe AOH of Delaware County. After consulting with the township and police advisors, William has graciously granted our request for a small religious service at the site of the dig when most, but not all, of the bones are removed. William tells us he expects this to take 2-3 months, putting a possible event in June. Stay tuned for further details.