Page 31 - The Westerner Magazine Halloween 2018
P. 31
Irish lost their bid for independence, the entire crew died. Normally, cholera
many of the participants went into exile. took about 50% of its victims at the time.
Sources such as diaries and newspapers
Duffy was an Irish Catholic who
helped with the account. We suspected
garnered significant contracts with the
that the workers were murdered there.
railroad. But it seems he had no
problem being a purveyor of his We also found out that the spot this
countrymen to industry. He had happened was owned by the Pratt
contracts in the Philadelphia and family, which operated a horse
Columbia, The Reading, and the West company. A horse company had the job
Chester Railroad. of protecting horses against theft.
Horses were like cars are in the current
The historical marker is at King Road
time and valued higher than Irish
and Sugartown Road. The cut was a
railroad workers.
gouging out of the landscape to lay
track as flat as possible. Farther on, Forty-seven men were listed on the log
there’s a fill that acts as a bridge. Our of the John Stamp, out of Derry, and
guys would have died while they were linked up with ten men already staying
making the fill. They were all buried in a house owned by Phil Duffy. The
while doing this work. log helps us with the possible
identification of those men we believe
A traditional story was that they died of
are buried at the site.
cholera. Records list nine hundred
people dead from cholera in Ghost stories abound about the site.
Philadelphia in 1832, but the number is When we began work there, many of
actually higher. The 57 who died were the homeowners came by to tell us
not included and neither were another stories. We’ve recorded many of those
49 railroad workers who died in stories in a book that came out in 2006
Downingtown. There were three called The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut.
groups, including a group of canal
It was three years after that when we
workers in Spring City in Chester
found the first skeletons. The delay was
County that wouldn’t have been
due to getting the proper permission
counted in the official tallies of dead.
from the local and state authorities as
Suspicions were that something other well as the property owner. We knew,
than cholera had killed the 57 because almost immediately, that the first bodies
