3. Dead Men Tell Tales: History and Science at Duffy’s Cut

The historical problems that the Duffy’s Cut Project has sought to address concern the location of an 1832 mass grave of Irish immigrant railroaders and the cause of their deaths at Mile 59 of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad track in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Stories of the workers’ death from a cholera outbreak were originally disseminated by a few contemporary newspapers: The Village Record (West Chester), The National Gazette and Literary Messenger (Philadelphia), and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Stories also abounded in railroad and local folklore, which told of Irish ghosts dancing on their graves close to the railroad fill being built by the deceased laborers at the time of their deaths. This chapter examines archival, geological, archeological, and anthropological perspectives, employed in tandem with GIScience and global positioning satellite techniques. These combined methods were used to inform the forensic excavation of the Mile 59 site, work that identifies the cause of the deaths of the immigrant Irish laborers as homicide, and not a cholera epidemic. The story unearthed by the Duffy’s Cut Project illustrates the power of integrating historical geography, geoscience, and textual approaches to re-frame the historiographies of immigration and labor during the early years of the nineteenth-century America Industrial Revolution.