When commuters on the R5 SEPTA prepare that connects suburban Chester County to Philadelphia strategy Malvern station, they may spot a sq. stone monument on the appropriate aspect in a clearing surrounded by a thick stand of forest.
Above it, an indication paid for by the Amtrak electrical staff union and suspended from the timber reads:
BURIAL PLOT OF IRISH RAILROAD WORKERS: At this web site, generally known as Duffy’s Reduce, fifty-seven Irish immigrant railroad staff from the counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry and Leitrim died of cholera and homicide in the summertime of 1832.
I’m a historian at Immaculata College, about one mile west of Duffy’s Reduce. In 2004, my colleagues and I had been those to find the mass grave after we excavated the positioning with the permission of the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Fee.
My college students, who had been about the identical age as Duffy’s staff in 1832, supplied quite a lot of the labor on the excavation.
Extra just lately, in Could 2025, we found human stays that counsel a second Irish immigrant railroader mass grave 11 miles west of Duffy’s Reduce, in Downingtown.
A SEPTA commuter prepare passes Duffy’s Reduce in Malvern, Pa.
William E. Watson, CC BY-NC-SA
57 useless railroaders
Duffy’s Reduce was named after an Irish Catholic immigrant railroad contractor named Philip Duffy, who lived from 1783-1871 and was most likely from County Donegal in northwest Eire.
I realized in regards to the web site and its doable mass grave from Pennsylvania Railroad paperwork that survived in my household.
A 1909 file, labeled “History of Duffy’s Cut Stone enclosure east of Malvern, Pennsylvania, which marks the burial place of 57 track laborers who were victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832,” was compiled by future Pennsylvania Railroad president Martin W. Clement when he was an assistant supervisor. My grandfather, who was Clement’s government assistant and later director of personnel, obtained the file earlier than the information had been auctioned off in 1972, and my brother confirmed me the file in 2002.
The Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad, the predecessor of the Pennsylvania Railroad, wished to shorten the journey time from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh from three to 4 weeks by Conestoga wagon to 3 to 4 days by rail, canal and river.
The file my brother had in his possession said that the useless railroaders at Duffy’s Reduce had been younger males, just lately arrived from Eire. It additionally mentioned the price of mile 59 was vastly costlier than the standard Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad mile. Laying a typical mile of P&C railroad price US$5,000 within the 1830s. However at mile 59, gouging the panorama with a “cut” to put the tracks on stage floor and bridging the valley with a fill – an earthen bridge – price $32,000. Though the work was particularly tough, the frequent laborers acquired about 25 cents a day.
Fragment of an Irish-made clay pipe unearthed close to the Duffy’s Reduce mass grave.
AP Picture/Matt Rourke
Many of the males had sailed from the town of Derry within the north of Eire to Philadelphia from April to June of 1832 aboard the John Stamp. The ship pulled into the Lazaretto quarantine station on the Delaware River in Essington, Pennsylvania, earlier than crusing on to Philadelphia.
Nobody on the John Stamp was reported to be in poor health. This was the peak of the 1832 cholera epidemic that in the end killed no less than 10,000 folks within the U.S.
Forty-seven laborers from the John Stamp ship joined 10 different Irish immigrant staff who had been already residing with Duffy in a rental home in Willistown, a mile south of the work web site.
But virtually as quickly as they arrived to the work camp at mile 59, so did cholera, which had unfold to Philadelphia from New York Metropolis.
Cholera within the camps
Cholera is a bacterial an infection that spreads as a result of poor sanitary practices during which human feces get into consuming water, through excrement handed into streams or by seepage from outhouses to wells.
However in 1832, folks believed cholera was linked to intemperance and vice, which had been thought to weaken the physique. Based on the prevailing miasma principle, it triggered outbreaks as soon as airborne. Immigrants and the poor had been regarded as particularly vulnerable to the illness and first vectors for its unfold.
Cholera causes excessive diarrhea and vomiting that result in fast electrolyte loss. In 1832 it was deadly in about 50% of instances. Within the Delaware Valley, cholera instances mounted from July into August 1832. Philadelphia registered its peak variety of instances, 173, on Aug. 6 and peak variety of deaths, 76, on Aug. 7. The toughest-hit areas within the area had been working-class neighborhoods and canal and railroad work camps.
A typical crew on a P&C mile numbered 100 to 120 males. Nonetheless, the work by Irish immigrants was segregated alongside sectarian traces on the railroads within the U.S., because it was within the Belfast dockyards on the identical time. The opposite half of the employees at mile 59, in accordance with Canal Fee stories, had been Irish Protestant immigrants who labored for an Irish Protestant contractor and did the much less harmful work of laying tracks. They didn’t die of cholera.
The creator, second from left, and his group on the dig web site at Duffy’s Reduce in 2011.
William E. Watson, CC BY-NC-SA
Indicators of a bloodbath
To excavate the positioning, we partnered with the Chester County Emerald Society, a regulation enforcement group that cleared our work with the county district legal professional, and the coroner, in case we discovered human stays. The College of Pennsylvania Museum supplied ground-penetrating radar, in addition to archaeological and anthropological help for the dig. Workers skilled my college students in the right way to correctly excavate and deal with artifacts and bones.
Our analysis group uncovered seven units of stays between 2009 and 2012 within the remaining japanese parts of the fill. The skeletons had been buried in coffins sealed with an distinctive variety of nails, maybe to include the cholera.
Evaluation on the UPenn Museum confirmed proof of violence to every of the skulls – with one cranium exhibiting each an ax blow and a bullet encased within the cranium. Researchers discovered no proof of defensive wounds on any skeleton, suggesting that the boys might need been tied up earlier than being killed.
After our group analyzed the stays, we got here to the startling conclusion that the boys didn’t die from cholera – they had been massacred.
I imagine that concern of cholera, an epidemic that some clergymen in America and England known as “a chastisement for the sins of the people,” and anti-immigrant sentiment fueled violence in opposition to them by native-born populations.
After forensic examinations of the stays, 5 of the skeletons had been reburied throughout a ceremony at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd in 2012. My group decided the identities of two of the deceased – 18-year-old John Ruddy from County Donegal and 29-year-old Catherine Burns, the daughter of one of many staff, from County Tyrone – and their stays had been returned to their house counties in Eire in 2013 and 2015.
Bishop Michael J. Fitzgerald takes half in a funeral at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in 2012 for the 5 Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants whose stays had been excavated from the Duffy’s Reduce web site.
AP Picture/Matt Rourke
A second mass grave in Chester County
Historic information led us to what we imagine is a second mass grave in Chester County.
This was P&C mile 48 in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. It was below the route of Irish immigrant contractor Peter Connor, whose crew of 100 to 120 males was reported to have all died across the identical time as Duffy’s crew.
Forty years later, Charles Pennypacker’s 1909 “History of Downingtown” recorded that the useless Irishmen in Downingtown had been carted north to a area the place they had been buried in a mass grave on the property of present-day Northwood Cemetery, “in the eastern part of the cemetery, near the gully.”
File picture from March 24, 2009, reveals bones recovered from the mass grave at Duffy’s Reduce.
AP Picture/Matt Rourke, File
On Could 15, 2025, the Duffy’s Reduce group unearthed the primary human stays from the Downingtown crew within the actual place reported by Pennypacker. This work has simply began.
Up and down the East Coast, there are quite a few mass graves of nameless staff who died of epidemics and overwork within the 1820s and 1830s. Most of these folks won’t ever have their tales instructed.
At Duffy’s Reduce, and now on the Downingtown web site, we hope to humanize a number of the hardworking immigrants who died constructing a vital a part of America’s industrial panorama.
Guests can view artifacts discovered at Duffy’s Reduce on the Duffy’s Reduce Museum within the Gabriele Library at Immaculata College in Malvern, Pa.
