This Land: Secrets of Duffy’s Cut Yield to Shovel and Science

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Bill Watson at a granite-block enclosure built in 1909 in honor of the Duffy's Cut dead. He is one of the people whose curiosity prompted the excavation of the site.

MALVERN, Pa. — They laid his bones in a bed of Bubble Wrap, with a care beyond what is normally given to fragile things. They double-boxed those bones and carried them last month to the United Parcel Service office on Spruce Street in Philadelphia. Then they printed out the address and paid the fee.

With that, the remains of a young man were soon soaring over the Atlantic Ocean he had crossed once in a three-masted ship. His name is believed to have been John Ruddy, and he was being returned to the Ireland he had left as a strapping teenage laborer. In 1832.

His voyage home is the latest turn in the tale of Duffy's Cut, a wooded patch that is little more than a sylvan blur to those aboard commuter trains rocketing past. It is a mass grave, in fact: the uneasy resting place for dozens of Irish immigrants who died during a cholera epidemic, just weeks after coming to America, as an old song says, to work upon the railway.

For the last decade, a different kind of rail gang — professors and students, scientists and landscapers — has been digging away at the layers of soil, myth and silence to unearth the unlucky inhabitants of Duffy's Cut and place them in both historical context and consecrated soil.

"The first seven bodies were here," said Bill Watson, 50, pointing to a brown-gray swath of muck as a downpour battered the dead leaves and another train whined past. A history professor at Immaculata University here in Malvern, he is also the de facto foreman of this erudite rail gang.

"And this is the shanty," Mr. Watson said, rainwater pouring off the brim of his baseball cap. "This is where the men lived."

It begins in late June 1832, when the John Stamp docked in Philadelphia, ending a two-month sail from Derry in northern Ireland. On board were dozens of young Irishmen eager to begin their American climb, bearing the names of Devine, and McIlheaney, and Skelton — and Ruddy, at 18 the youngest.

Working for a contractor named Duffy, a crew of about 120 men was soon digging through clay and shale to fill the lows and level the highs for a train line. "A sturdy-looking band of the sons of Erin," a local newspaper called them.

But an outbreak of cholera caused a Philadelphia panic that hot summer. The disease struck the work site, probably by way of a contaminated creek running past the men's crude living quarters — their shanty. The local community shunned the sick foreigners, leaving acts of kindness to a few courageous Sisters of Charity who ventured out from Philadelphia.

When the epidemic subsided, the official account of the sad but unremarkable toll at Track Mile 59, also known as Duffy's Cut, was eight dead, with the shanty burned down and buried by a humane blacksmith.

Life continued along its track. Almost immediately, though, there came folkloric whispers of something not right. Glowing apparitions were said to have been seen dancing down at the cut.

An Irish railroad worker eventually fenced off a spot in the general area, out of respect. Then, in 1909, a midlevel rail official named Martin Clement erected a granite-block enclosure. But his superiors said no to an explanatory plaque, a decision that left generations of hikers to encounter a memorial without context in the middle of the woods.

Nearly a century passed before serendipity finally blessed Duffy's Cut.

Mr. Watson and his twin, Frank, a Lutheran minister, were sorting through family things in 2002 when they took a close look at an old file. It turned out that this Martin Clement, who later became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had kept an extensive file on Duffy's Cut, and that his executive assistant — their grandfather! — had taken the file after the railroad vanished into a merger in the late 1960s.

These internal records indicated that at least 57 people — not eight — had died at Duffy's Cut. "Something was off," Bill Watson said. "It made us dig deeper."

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