(The following story by Benjamin Y. Lowe appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on March 9.)
PHILADELPHIA — Somewhere near SEPTA’s R-5 Line in Malvern is the mass grave of 57 Irish workers who died while toiling on the railroad in the 1830s.
For years, people have believed they were buried just feet from the track – one marker was placed at the spot in 1909, another in 1998.
But recent research by two Immaculata University professors, William E. Watson and John Ahtes, now challenges that presumed location – and other aspects of the workers’ sad story.
“It’s mostly myth and forklore until now,” Watson said. “We’re in the process of putting a real history behind it.”
That may be so, but two local residents familiar with the site wonder why the professors are asking questions. They say the bodies buried in southern East Whiteland Township should be left alone.
“Why is it so necessary to look for the bones after all these years?” asked Werner Liebig, one of the two opponents.
Watson and Ahtes have researched the site, known as Duffy’s Cut, since October 2002. They are preparing to find out whether bones are really buried there, and, if so, they hope to excavate and analyze them to figure out what happened.
Watson, a medieval history professor, said the men likely were buried in a mass grave at the bottom of a hill they were hired to build for the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad in 1832.
“We hope to find out the number of men [at the site], and our goal is to have them interred properly,” Watson said.
But any proposed excavation, he said, would depend on results from a test similar to a magnetic resonance image (MRI) to be conducted later this month.
Analyzing the bones also could provide more information about the cause of the men’s deaths.
Still, Liebig and another resident, Daniel Maguire, said the site should be left alone.
Six years ago, the two men repaired the granite monument that the railroad built for the workers in 1909. They also installed a plaque that hangs above the stone memorial stating black diphtheria as a cause of death. They conduct a small ceremony at the site every St. Patrick’s Day.
“I can’t believe they are going to spend the time doing this,” Liebig said. “What are they going to gain? I think it should be left alone.”
Both men believe the bodies are near the monument and say they are skeptical that their account could be wrong.
Ahtes, though, said his and Watson’s research tells a different story:
The Irishmen were hired in Philadelphia more than 170 years ago to help build part of the railroad, Watson said.
Their task was to bridge two hills in the southwestern part of the township with a large mound of dirt. They worked for Phillip Duffy, a Willistown railroad contractor, who probably was waiting for workers on the dock when the men’s ship from Ireland arrived in Philadelphia.
The approximately 57 Irishmen who started work that June were dead by the end of August. Duffy started out with a work gang of about 120.
The work there was delayed at least six months and completed by April 1834.
“The [original] contract suggests that they would have gotten another crew up from down the line or some fresh workers,” Ahtes said.
Duffy’s Cut is about 150 feet high and two football fields long. It still carries SEPTA, Amtrak and freight trains along what was once the Main Line of Public Works, a state project of railroads, canals and roads that crossed Pennsylvania.
Walter Licht, a University of Pennsylvania professor and railroad historian, said it was common for employees who died on the job to be buried near the tracks. But he said the number of workers believed to be buried at the site surprised him. He said far more railroad workers died from accidents than from disease.
Watson’s work started in September 2002 when he found a file among papers that he and his twin brother, Frank, had inherited from their grandfather, Joseph F. Tripician. Tripician was the private secretary to Martin W. Clement, who was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad for 16 years starting in 1933.
Watson said the file explaining the site’s history was kept in the company’s vault until Tripician removed it shortly after the railroad’s bankruptcy in 1970.
Information in the file led Watson to a 300-square-foot depression in a wooded area near the tracks – about 500 feet from the marked location. He thinks it could be the mass grave.
In their research, Watson and Ahtes have searched local newspapers, read through diaries, checked immigration records, and paged through the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad archive.
“This is still a work in progress, and we will continue our research until we have exhausted all posssible sources,” Ahtes said.