Unearthing a mystery over fate of Irish railway workers

Young and strong, 57 Irish immigrants began gruelling work in the summer of 1832 on the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad. Within weeks, all were dead of cholera - or were they murdered?

A team of archeologists and historians believe they have discovered a 19th-century crime scene, after unearthing two skulls from a mass grave that showed signs of violence, including a possible bullet hole. Another pair of skulls found at the site also displayed trauma.

"This was much more than a cholera epidemic," William Watson, chairman of the history department at Pennsylvania's Immaculata University, said.

He and his twin brother Frank have been working for nearly a decade to unravel the 178-year-old mystery.

Anti-Irish sentiment made 19th-century America a hostile place for the workers, who lived in a hut near the train tracks.

The Watsons and their research team have recovered seven sets of remains since digging up the first shin bone in March 2009, following years of fruitlessly scouring the area for the men's final resting place. One victim has been tentatively identified, pending DNA tests.

The brothers have long supposed many of the workers succumbed to cholera. The disease was rampant at the time, and had a typical mortality rate of 40 per cent to 60 per cent.

The other immigrants, they surmise, were killed by vigilantes due to anti-Irish prejudice, tension between affluent residents and poor transient workers, intense fear of cholera - or a combination of all three.

Now, their theory is supported by the four recovered skulls, which indicate the men probably suffered blows to the head. At least one may have been shot, said Janet Monge, an anthropologist working on the project.

"I don't think we need to be so hesitant in coming to the conclusion violence was the cause of death and not cholera," Ms Monge said.

Coffin nails mingled with the remains establish that at least some workers received formal burials, bones indicate the labourers were muscular despite relatively poor diets and teeth reveal the men were not wealthy enough to afford the sugary sweets that cause cavities.

"They do have indications on their skeletons that life was not a bowl of cherries," said Ms Monge, who is also the keeper of skeletal collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The Watsons learned in 2002 of the workers' demise from the papers of their late grandfather, who worked for the railroad after the men died.Their quest, called The Duffy's Cut Project, is named after Philip Duffy, who hired the Irishmen to build a section of the track.

When the immigrants died in August 1832, Duffy ordered his blacksmith to burn the hut for sanitary reasons and bury the bodies in the railroad fill, the Watsons say. The men's families were never told of their deaths.

A passenger list for the John Stamp, a ship that sailed from Ireland to Philadelphia four months earlier, offers possible identities for 15 workers who came from Donegal, Tyrone and Derry counties.

Early on, the Watsons tentatively identified one victim as 18-year-old John Ruddy, based on bone size and the ship's manifest. They have since found a section of teeth with a rare anomaly - a missing upper molar that never formed - shared by some Ruddy family members in Ireland. Researchers hope for DNA confirmation in about six months.