question answering related to the american history

User Generated

Sgbbzn

Humanities

Description

F14 Capstone #2 Doc 3 Graphic.pdf

F14 Capstone #2 Doc 3.doc

F14 Capstone #2 project sheets.doc

I want you to answer all questions for document 3. All attached files are related to the question sheet I want you to answer.

So you must skip the first six questions which are related to documents 1 & 2 

Unformatted Attachment Preview

Document 3 The Bones beneath the Tracks by Samuel Hughes The[University of] Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov/Dec 2010, selections taken from pp. 34-43 Items within brackets written in italics reflect additions by Mrs Ross. Three dots […] indicate material has been left out. For the entire article and illustrations, go to http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1110/feature1_1.html 1 Think of a jigsaw puzzle, made up of thousands of pieces. It depicts a wooded valley and a tree-lined embankment leading up to a railroad line. Now imagine that it’s three-dimensional, with tulip poplarsa rising into the sky, their roots reaching deep into the soil for nutrients. Then add another dimension: time, warping back … into the early 1830s and curving around to the present. Finally (and the staunchly empirical can skip this part), cover it all with a nebulousb fabric, which the dead pass through to seek out the living. 2 Now shake it up and throw the pieces out into the woods. Then try to reassemble them, in the dark. 3 No one alive knows exactly what happened during that searingc August of 1832 in the rough slice of southeastern Pennsylvania known as Duffy’s Cut. This much is clear: 57 Irish laborers who had been constructing a particularly difficult stretch of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad between Malvern and Frazer died suddenly in that rural valley, two months after many of them had arrived in Philadelphia on a ship from Derry. Their bodies were buried hastily in the dirt and gravel fill that would soon support railroad tracks. 4 For more than 170 years, on the rare occasions that the deaths were mentioned at all, they were attributed to the outbreak of Asiatic cholera that had swept through the region, killing thousands. Now, after several years of poking around and several more of focused digging, it’s become increasingly clear that something more sinisterd happened as well. 5 The best way to get to the Duffy’s Cut dig site these days is to park your car … in a certain Malvern housing development …, then walk down a hill and cross a small stream that runs through the wooded valley. Thirty or 40 more yards over a low wooded ridge and you’re there. 6 The site cuts into the steep embankment, where a massive, twin-trunk tulip poplar thrusts up between the denuded, squared-off digging units. Higher up the fill and a few yards to the north run the Amtrak and SEPTA [train]tracks. 7 “There’s a saying that under every mile of track is a dead Irishman, here on the East Coast,” says William Watson [UPenn grad class] G’86 Gr’90. “And that seems to be the case here. They died building something of great consequence—this was the biggest industrial endeavor in Pennsylvania, the second railroad in North America. And their story needs to be told.” … 8 “There’s a lot of cases of people getting ground up in the Industrial Revolution,” says Watson. “But there are so few cases of a personal history being recovered. For a lot of people in Ireland, this is important, because they knew individuals in their own lineage had the same experience—they were never heard from again after arriving in America. “ 9 We all know that if circumstances had been different, it would have been us buried there, or our sons buried there,” he adds. “It hits home on a personal level when you realize these guys were, like, 20 years old. They come over here and try to get the American Dream and—boom!—they’re snuffed oute, six to eight weeks on arrival.” 10 By the time the John Stamp [ship] arrived in Philadelphia from Derry [in Ireland] on June 23, 1832, Pennsylvania had embarkedf on an ambitious public-works program that would link Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by railroad and canal. The Main Line of Public Works—a response to the Erie Canal to the north and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the south—included the 82-mile Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad (P&C). In March 1828 the state legislature appropriated the massive sum of $2 million to start the project, which would run between Columbia (on the east bank of the Susquehanna River) and Philadelphia—and which, its supporters hoped, would be completed in two years. 11 Contracts for the railroad were parceled out by the mile, and by June 1829 a contractor named Philip Duffy was reported by the American Republican newspaper to be “prosecuting his Herculean task with a sturdy looking band of the sons of Erin.” The Irish-born Duffy, who spoke Gaelic as well as English, would meet incoming ships at the Philadelphia docks and hire the new arrivals to work on the railroads. “Philip Duffy, to me, reflected a kind of a sinister character,” says Bill Watson. “Frank and Earl [others working on the site] have a somewhat more middle-ofthe-road interpretation of him as a labor contractor. He wanted to earn a maximum profit, and I don’t think he really cared whether these guys lived or died. So he was an exploiterg of his own countrymen.” … a: poplars=large, tall trees; b: nebulous=filmy,see-through; c:searing=very hot; d:sinister=scary, threatening; e:snuffed out=eliminated, killed quickly; f:embarked=set out, began a trip; g:exploiter=a selfish person who takes advantage of peopl 1 12 While the Mile 59 crew would have been made up of 100 to 120 men, only about half lived at Duffy’s Cut, where they slept in a large shanty built on the ravine’s west side and were paid about 50 cents a day, plus whiskey. The average contract to build a mile of railroad was between $4,000 and $6,000 in the 1830s; Duffy’s contract for Mile 59 was for $23,000—and even that fell far short of the final cost of $32,000. By August 1832, the work was already behind schedule, and Duffy himself was losing money. But that was hardly the most serious problem he was facing. 13 It started in India, probably in the Ganges River delta. At the time, most physicians believed that cholera was caused by bad air, a theory that seemed to be confirmed by the high casualty rates in poor, malodorousa neighborhoods. In fact, it’s spread mostly by human fecal matter in drinking water. … its symptoms include severe abdominal pain, massive diarrhea, and vomiting. Death, from extreme dehydration and shock, comes swiftly to 40 to 60 percent of its victims. 14 The second cholera pandemic would kill an estimated 150,000 people around the world, and by the summer of 1832 it had reached North America. On July 7, the first case of cholera appeared in Philadelphia. By the week of August 4-10, 830 cases and 326 deaths had been recorded. The pandemic also coincidedb with the “first large waves of Irish Catholic immigrants in Pennsylvania,” as Watson noted in an article for U.S. Catholic Historian. The implications of that timing were potentially combustible combustiblec. “Irish Catholics were understood in Protestant America to be the agents of the infection of Poperyd and subversione,” Watson and his colleagues noted in The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut; “when they were also perceived to be the agents of infection with cholera, any result is imaginable.” 15 A Chester County newspaper, the Village Record [of 1832], had already warned that the failure to “preserve a good understanding between the people living adjacentf to the route, and the contractors and hands employed in the work … has been the fruitful source of disorders and riots in some parts of the country.” 16 Disorders and riots were no empty words. In 1831 a mob burned St. Mary’s Church in New York, and in 1844 the Philadelphia Nativist Riots led to numerous deaths and injuries and the burning of St. Augustine’s Church. 17 When cholera struck at Duffy’s Cut in mid-August, “most of the workmen fled from the infected shanty at once,” wrote Julian Sachse in an 1889 newspaper article that drew on the local residents’ memories, “but so great was the fear of the surrounding population, that ever [sic] house was closed against fugitives, no one was found willing to give them food or shelter.” It now appears that the fear-driven reaction among the neighboring population was more violently pro-active than that. 18 “We’ve always had suspicions, because of the 100-percent casualty rate,” says Watson. “There should have been a couple of those guys who survived. The railroad file says that the men tried to flee and were forced back into the valley. So those guys died outside of the valley, and were brought back in. And the other guys are kind of in an enforced-quarantine scenario—forced back into the valley to die.” 19 Whether the men who tried to flee were sick themselves or simply trying to escape the site is unknowable. Either way, Watson believes that they were turned back—violently—by local vigilantes. His moneyg is on the East Whiteland Horse Company, whose business was catching and punishing horse thieves, and whose principals included the owners of the property that abutted Mile 59. But his evidence is, so far, circumstantial at best. 20 A few heroes did emerge. One was a local blacksmith in Duffy’s employ whose name was probably Malachi Harris. 21 “When all fled he alone remained and ministered to the sick,” wrote Sachse, “and when the scourge claimed its first victim … he laid the man out as decently as he could, dug a grave single-handedly … then returned and dragged the corpse over to the opposite side of the ravine and buried it.” 22 Then there were the four Sisters of Charity, a Catholic order whose members served as the “essential caregivers” (Watson’s words) of the 1832 epidemic in the Philadelphia area. Sent by church authorities “to attend to the sick and dying in the shanty in the ravine,” as Sachse recounted, the four were taken by stagecoach to the Green Tree Inn between Paoli and Malvern, but that was “as near the infected spot as the driver could be induced to go.” They walked the rest of the way to Duffy’s Cut, where they administered to the dying men as best they could—then were forced to walk the entire way back to Philadelphia in the blazing heat, “so great was the fear of contagion” among local residents and stagecoach drivers. 23 It isn’t clear where Philip Duffy was when the epidemic struck—he may have been overseeing a section of the West Chester Rail Road for which he had also contracted—but when he heard that all were dead, he ordered the blacksmith to “set fire to all the buildings and utensils on the ground.” Soon a new crew was hired, and work was resumed, whereupon “the common grave was rounded up and a rough slam placed over the bodies of the unknown dead.” 24 Though the local newspapers did report an outbreak of cholera among the railroad workers, only eight or nine deaths were noted. One paper, the Village Record, even wrote a retraction to an earlier story (the issue has disappeared from the Chester County Historical Society’s archives), saying that “to prevent exaggeration, we deem it proper to state, that on the Railway … a fortnight ago, several cases of Cholera occurred, eight of which proved fatal—it then ceased suddenly as it commenced.” The paper added that the whole railroad line “has been, through the summer, with the few exceptions noted, remarkably healthy. a:malodorous=smelly; b:coincided= at the same time; c: combustible=easily set on fire; d:Popery=relating to the Roman Catholic Church; e: subversion=something which 2 destroys or ruins; f:adjacent=next to; g: money = best bet 25 A few months later, however, P&C Superintendent William Mitchell acknowledged that Duffy had been in “great difficulty and distress” on account of the fact that “nearly one half of his men died of Cholera.” That did not prevent Mitchell from calling the contractor a “perfect master of the art of complaining with or without cause.” No one ever said the Industrial Revolution was gentle. 26 Duffy was a wealthy man by the time he died in 1871 at age 88. His mansion still stands at 40th and Pine streets in West Philadelphia. 27 7 “We often wonder what it was like for him in his later years, as he’s sitting out on his porch,” says Bill Watson. “Is he pondering what had happened? Or is he just counting his money?” 28 Others remembered, quietly. In 1870, a group of railroad employees led by one Patrick Doyle built a small picket fence, within sight of the current tracks, as a memorial to the dead. By then the tracks had already been moved a few yards to the north by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), which bought the P&C in 1857. In 1909, Martin Clement, a PRR supervisor who would later become president of the railroad, replaced the fence with a square-shaped memorial wall made from stones that had supported the original tracks. After that, apart from modest individual efforts, the world pretty much forgot about Duffy’s Cut.… 29 Fast-forwarda to Labor Day weekend 2002. Bill and some other Watson family members had gathered for a cookout at Frank’s home in Freehold, New Jersey. Bill had brought a pile of files that had belonged to their Grandfather Tripician, and when they finished divvying up all the old railroad photos and newspaper clippings, Frank brought out something that their grandmother had given him after Grandpa Tripician passed away. 30 It was PRR file # 004.01 C, and it concerned something called Duffy’s Cut. 31 “I took one look at it and realized it was a hidden history connected to the very area where I had gotten a job” at Immaculata, says Bill. “I knew I had to find that spot. 32 ” Then something in the file caught his eye. It was the newspaper story from June 1889 by Julian Sachse titled “The Legend About Duffy’s Cut On the Pennsylvania Railroad Between Malvern and Frazer.” Transcribed on PRR letterhead as part of the official file, the story included a lengthy interview with an elderly area resident. 33 On a “warm murky night” in September 1832, just weeks after the Irishmen had been buried, the man recounted, he had been returning from the Green Tree Inn and was walking along the railroad. When he came to Duffy’s Fill, he told his interviewer: … the night was hot and foggy, so I trudged up between the stone blocks [the railroad sills, on which the tracks were laid] until I got on the fill, and there I [saw] with my own eyes the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a dancing around the big trench where they were buried … They looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire, and there they were a hopping and bobbing on their graves. 34 Sachse gently challenged the elderly resident, but the man insisted that “what he had seen were the disembodied spirits of the laborers who were buried in the trench.” And, he added: “I hadn’t been drinking no whiskey either that night.” 35 As soon as he read that story, Bill called his bagpiping friend Tom Conner and said, “I think I may have an explanation for what we saw that night. [In 2000, Bill and Tom had seen what looked like “illuminated figures” from Bill’s office window which looked toward Duffy’s Cut.] 36 ” File # 004.01 C—prosaically titled “History of ‘Duffy’s Cut’ Stone enclosure east of Malvern, Pa., which marks the burial place of 57 track laborers who were victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832”—was not supposed to be seen by outsiders. (A nephew of Clement’s recently told Bill Watson that as late as 1959, the PRR president “was telling people to keep it secret,” Watson recalls. “He remembers being called into Clement’s office to see this file—my grandfather was present—and he said, ‘This is what happened here, but you’re not to tell anybody.’”) 37 As the title made clear, the railroad’s own investigation concluded that 57 men—not eight or nine—had died, and the correspondence from PRR employees included some illuminating tidbitsb about the possible location of the bodies and the existence of primary-source materials. (One brief note says simply: “Miss Ogden says that her sisters diary shows entry in August 1832 she died of cholera at Fraser.”) 38 In a way, it’s surprising that the file exists at all. After all, why would a rising executive in a powerful corporation like the PRR put together a file of material related to disease and death along the railroad lines, and which might even lead to revelations of murder? 39 As Bill Watson tells it, there was a human connection that began in 1909 when Clement, then assistant supervisor at Paoli, was living in Malvern with an Irish family named Donahue. 40 “George Donahue’s wife, Bridget Doyle, was the sister of Patrick Doyle, the guy who put the first fence up at the site in 1870,” he explains. “So Clement heard about it from him. Doyle probably learned about it from the blacksmith, Harris, who was back in the area a couple decades later providing water and ballast for the railroad.” a: fast forward: moving ahead quickly b; illuminating tidbits: little pieces of knowledge which help a person understand something by shining light on it 3 41 Clement, who became president of the railroad in 1935, has evolved in Watson’s mind from a controlling, faintly sinister character who had kept the file secret to a sympathetic figure who had kept the story alive but had to keep it secret. (There were, Watson says, “well-placed people involved in this.”) 42 The whole story “would have been lost to history without Clement,” adds Frank. “He’s a key figure in making sure the story was preserved.” 43 Incidentally, when Clement had the stone wall built in 1909, he proposed that a plaquea be attached to it with the words: 57 men are buried here. Died with the cholera during the construction of the road in 1832. The proposal was turned down by the railroad as too expensive…… 44 It was a “convergence of folklore and railroad memory and science,” in Bill Watson’s words, that brought them to that spot on the old fill. The folklore part was the elderly resident’s ghost story, and whether or not you buy into the supernaturalb aspects, it does mark the spot where contemporary observers believed the burial site to be—one confirmed by the 1909 railroad memory of George Dougherty. The science part was Tim Bechtel, principal geophysicist for Enviroscan (a Lancaster County-based firm specializing in geophysical investigations), and his ground-penetrating radar… 45 When they got the intriguing GPR reading from Bechtel [suggesting the presence of human remains in the ground], it was the dead of winter and the ground was rock hard. But by March 2009 the earth had softened enough to let them resume digging. Finally, a few days after St. Patrick’s Day, one of the regular volunteers named Bob Frank hit what he describes as “weird colored soil, different from anything else” they had seen. There was something else: coffin nails. Then a tibia. Then a vertebra. And finally a section of very old track, just inches from a human skull. 46 [The skull numbered] SK001 is trying to tell us something. So are his comrades, [skulls numbered] SK002, SK006, and SK007. (SK003, -004, and -005 have kind of fallen to pieces, so we’ll leave them alone for now.) I don’t speak Skull, so I’ve asked Janet Monge to translate for me. Which is why she’s eyeballing the cranium of SK001 like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick. SK001 is saying My name is John Ruddy, Monge thinks. But she’s not positive. 47 Eighteen-year-old John Ruddy was the youngest of the young men from Donegal, Tyrone, and Derry who sailed to Philadelphia on the John Stamp in June 1832. From the unfused, zig-zag stitching along the skull that indicates immature facial development, Monge has deducedc that SK001 was a very young man. Other features suggest that he had also suffered from chronic ear infections and some “stressful phases” in his growth and development by the time he died. 48 He’s also missing his first molar, a one-in-a-million congenitald trait shared by quite a few members of the Ruddy family of Ireland. “ 49 I’m hesitant to say it’s really John Ruddy,” says Monge. “But at the moment, that seems like not a bad guess.” The next step involves DNA testing with Ruddy relatives. 50 Whoever he is, SK001 seems to have been “bonked on the head,” as Monge puts it for us laymen. There’s a “little diddle” on his skull, she explains, which suggests peri-mortem trauma, even if it’s not exactly conclusive. 51 SK002 has a more pronounced “bash,” along with the kind of “plastic distortion” that indicates that it happened “when the bone was like it is in life—full of collagen and mineral,” she says. “It’s very directed at a very particular place.” 52 Though both skulls indicated possible violence, neither was conclusivee enough for Monge to be comfortable with words like murder. The other three remains they found last year were “too fragmentaryf to really do anything with” (though she does offer the very tentativeg and intriguingh possibility that one of them may have been female). 53 The discovery that at least some of the workers had been buried in coffins lends itself to multiple interpretations. “ 54 It meant that someone took care to make sure that they were buried properly,” says Bill Watson. “It’s a little better than just throwing them into a pit. But now that we found out they were murdered, it’s even more horrible than any of us could have ever imagined.” In his view, it’s another piece of a literal and figurative cover-up. “ 55 The tough part is staying completely impartial and objective,” says Cox. “We have to let our findings speak for themselves and tell their story, rather than trying to fit the evidence to the existing story that has been told for the last 175 years. Since it’s such a sensational tale, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that we have to consider all the possibilities, not just the brutal murder scenario.” … 56 This past July, the crew found two more sets of remains. This time, the skulls were speaking loud and clear. 57 “When we started to take out skeletons 6 and 7, the trauma became even more dramatic,” says Monge. “That’s why we moved from a hesitant, ‘trauma associated with that’ [assessment] to one in which we are really convinced.” a: plaque=a sign; b: supernatural = beyond science, like a miracle; c: deduced=figured out based on evidence; d: congenital=inherited, genetic; 4 e: conclusive=definite; f: fragmentary: sketchy, in pieces; g: tentative=not defimite or sure, experimental; h: intruiguing=interesting 58 Usually, blunt-force trauma comes from an object with a large surface area, which “doesn’t make that sort of characteristic indentation and break that you would see with a tool,” she explains. “In the case of skeleton 6, the trauma is thin, long, and narrow—it’s shaped very much like an ax. And another trauma that we cleaned off may actually be a bullet [hole].” The only reason she says may “is because these low-velocity lead bullets that came out of basically musket-like guns don’t have the same kind of characteristics that a high-velocity, rotating bullet coming out of a modern firearm would have.” 59 Recently they got another piece of information, courtesy of a magnetometer. “ 60 The Schoenstedt magnetometer has shown metal in the skull of SK006,” Monge wrote in an email early last month. The team was still waiting for the results of the X-ray, which would indicate exactly where in the skull the metal is located, she added. “It keeps getting more and more interesting.” 61 Whether the Duffy’s Cut Project will find the remains of all 57 Irishmen remains to be seen. They’re hopeful that the main cachea is just a little farther to the west, near a small ravine. If they do find those remains, or even if they don’t, they’ll take what they have to West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd and give them a proper burial, complete with a Celtic cross and, undoubtedly, some plaintive bagpiping. 62 As for Bill Watson, he’s still digging, in archives as well as in the old railroad fill, still hoping that the 1832 diary of Miss Mary Ogden or some other primary-source material will surface and shed new light on what happened that summer. And while he’s keenly aware of the potential hits to a scholarly reputation, he’s still not backing down from what he saw that night 10 years ago. “ 63 John Ahtes believed, and I believed, that this whole thing started with [the ghosts of the 57] men reaching out for someone to help them,” he says. “I mean, that was the only way that we could have actually realized what that [PRR] [Pennsylvania Railroad] file really represented. I don’t know how else to explain it. “ 64 I don’t think Catholics can say that there’s a world without spirits without sounding like an atheist,” he adds. “You know, there’s something out there. Do they ever come through the veil? I think they may.” a: cache= hiding place b: hits = [slang] damage 5 Document 3 The Bones beneath the Tracks by Samuel Hughes The[University of] Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov/Dec 2010, selections taken from pp. 34-43 Items within brackets written in italics reflect additions by Mrs Ross. Three dots […] indicate material has been left out. For the entire article and illustrations, go to http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1110/feature1_1.html 1 Think of a jigsaw puzzle, made up of thousands of pieces. It depicts a wooded valley and a tree-lined embankment leading up to a railroad line. Now imagine that it’s three-dimensional, with tulip poplarsa rising into the sky, their roots reaching deep into the soil for nutrients. Then add another dimension: time, warping back … into the early 1830s and curving around to the present. Finally (and the staunchly empirical can skip this part), cover it all with a nebulousb fabric, which the dead pass through to seek out the living. 2 Now shake it up and throw the pieces out into the woods. Then try to reassemble them, in the dark. 3 No one alive knows exactly what happened during that searingc August of 1832 in the rough slice of southeastern Pennsylvania known as Duffy’s Cut. This much is clear: 57 Irish laborers who had been constructing a particularly difficult stretch of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad between Malvern and Frazer died suddenly in that rural valley, two months after many of them had arrived in Philadelphia on a ship from Derry. Their bodies were buried hastily in the dirt and gravel fill that would soon support railroad tracks. 4 For more than 170 years, on the rare occasions that the deaths were mentioned at all, they were attributed to the outbreak of Asiatic cholera that had swept through the region, killing thousands. Now, after several years of poking around and several more of focused digging, it’s become increasingly clear that something more sinisterd happened as well. 5 The best way to get to the Duffy’s Cut dig site these days is to park your car … in a certain Malvern housing development …, then walk down a hill and cross a small stream that runs through the wooded valley. Thirty or 40 more yards over a low wooded ridge and you’re there. 6 The site cuts into the steep embankment, where a massive, twin-trunk tulip poplar thrusts up between the denuded, squared-off digging units. Higher up the fill and a few yards to the north run the Amtrak and SEPTA [train]tracks. 7 “There’s a saying that under every mile of track is a dead Irishman, here on the East Coast,” says William Watson [UPenn grad class] G’86 Gr’90. “And that seems to be the case here. They died building something of great consequence—this was the biggest industrial endeavor in Pennsylvania, the second railroad in North America. And their story needs to be told.” … 8 “There’s a lot of cases of people getting ground up in the Industrial Revolution,” says Watson. “But there are so few cases of a personal history being recovered. For a lot of people in Ireland, this is important, because they knew individuals in their own lineage had the same experience—they were never heard from again after arriving in America. “ 9 We all know that if circumstances had been different, it would have been us buried there, or our sons buried there,” he adds. “It hits home on a personal level when you realize these guys were, like, 20 years old. They come over here and try to get the American Dream and—boom!—they’re snuffed oute, six to eight weeks on arrival.” 10 By the time the John Stamp [ship] arrived in Philadelphia from Derry [in Ireland] on June 23, 1832, Pennsylvania had embarkedf on an ambitious public-works program that would link Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by railroad and canal. The Main Line of Public Works—a response to the Erie Canal to the north and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the south—included the 82-mile Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad (P&C). In March 1828 the state legislature appropriated the massive sum of $2 million to start the project, which would run between Columbia (on the east bank of the Susquehanna River) and Philadelphia—and which, its supporters hoped, would be completed in two years. 11 Contracts for the railroad were parceled out by the mile, and by June 1829 a contractor named Philip Duffy was reported by the American Republican newspaper to be “prosecuting his Herculean task with a sturdy looking band of the sons of Erin.” The Irish-born Duffy, who spoke Gaelic as well as English, would meet incoming ships at the Philadelphia docks and hire the new arrivals to work on the railroads. “Philip Duffy, to me, reflected a kind of a sinister character,” says Bill Watson. “Frank and Earl [others working on the site] have a somewhat more middle-ofthe-road interpretation of him as a labor contractor. He wanted to earn a maximum profit, and I don’t think he really cared whether these guys lived or died. So he was an exploiterg of his own countrymen.” … a: poplars=large, tall trees; b: nebulous=filmy,see-through; c:searing=very hot; d:sinister=scary, threatening; e:snuffed out=eliminated, killed quickly; f:embarked=set out, began a trip; g:exploiter=a selfish person who takes advantage of peopl 1 12 While the Mile 59 crew would have been made up of 100 to 120 men, only about half lived at Duffy’s Cut, where they slept in a large shanty built on the ravine’s west side and were paid about 50 cents a day, plus whiskey. The average contract to build a mile of railroad was between $4,000 and $6,000 in the 1830s; Duffy’s contract for Mile 59 was for $23,000—and even that fell far short of the final cost of $32,000. By August 1832, the work was already behind schedule, and Duffy himself was losing money. But that was hardly the most serious problem he was facing. 13 It started in India, probably in the Ganges River delta. At the time, most physicians believed that cholera was caused by bad air, a theory that seemed to be confirmed by the high casualty rates in poor, malodorousa neighborhoods. In fact, it’s spread mostly by human fecal matter in drinking water. … its symptoms include severe abdominal pain, massive diarrhea, and vomiting. Death, from extreme dehydration and shock, comes swiftly to 40 to 60 percent of its victims. 14 The second cholera pandemic would kill an estimated 150,000 people around the world, and by the summer of 1832 it had reached North America. On July 7, the first case of cholera appeared in Philadelphia. By the week of August 4-10, 830 cases and 326 deaths had been recorded. The pandemic also coincidedb with the “first large waves of Irish Catholic immigrants in Pennsylvania,” as Watson noted in an article for U.S. Catholic Historian. The implications of that timing were potentially combustible combustiblec. “Irish Catholics were understood in Protestant America to be the agents of the infection of Poperyd and subversione,” Watson and his colleagues noted in The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut; “when they were also perceived to be the agents of infection with cholera, any result is imaginable.” 15 A Chester County newspaper, the Village Record [of 1832], had already warned that the failure to “preserve a good understanding between the people living adjacentf to the route, and the contractors and hands employed in the work … has been the fruitful source of disorders and riots in some parts of the country.” 16 Disorders and riots were no empty words. In 1831 a mob burned St. Mary’s Church in New York, and in 1844 the Philadelphia Nativist Riots led to numerous deaths and injuries and the burning of St. Augustine’s Church. 17 When cholera struck at Duffy’s Cut in mid-August, “most of the workmen fled from the infected shanty at once,” wrote Julian Sachse in an 1889 newspaper article that drew on the local residents’ memories, “but so great was the fear of the surrounding population, that ever [sic] house was closed against fugitives, no one was found willing to give them food or shelter.” It now appears that the fear-driven reaction among the neighboring population was more violently pro-active than that. 18 “We’ve always had suspicions, because of the 100-percent casualty rate,” says Watson. “There should have been a couple of those guys who survived. The railroad file says that the men tried to flee and were forced back into the valley. So those guys died outside of the valley, and were brought back in. And the other guys are kind of in an enforced-quarantine scenario—forced back into the valley to die.” 19 Whether the men who tried to flee were sick themselves or simply trying to escape the site is unknowable. Either way, Watson believes that they were turned back—violently—by local vigilantes. His moneyg is on the East Whiteland Horse Company, whose business was catching and punishing horse thieves, and whose principals included the owners of the property that abutted Mile 59. But his evidence is, so far, circumstantial at best. 20 A few heroes did emerge. One was a local blacksmith in Duffy’s employ whose name was probably Malachi Harris. 21 “When all fled he alone remained and ministered to the sick,” wrote Sachse, “and when the scourge claimed its first victim … he laid the man out as decently as he could, dug a grave single-handedly … then returned and dragged the corpse over to the opposite side of the ravine and buried it.” 22 Then there were the four Sisters of Charity, a Catholic order whose members served as the “essential caregivers” (Watson’s words) of the 1832 epidemic in the Philadelphia area. Sent by church authorities “to attend to the sick and dying in the shanty in the ravine,” as Sachse recounted, the four were taken by stagecoach to the Green Tree Inn between Paoli and Malvern, but that was “as near the infected spot as the driver could be induced to go.” They walked the rest of the way to Duffy’s Cut, where they administered to the dying men as best they could—then were forced to walk the entire way back to Philadelphia in the blazing heat, “so great was the fear of contagion” among local residents and stagecoach drivers. 23 It isn’t clear where Philip Duffy was when the epidemic struck—he may have been overseeing a section of the West Chester Rail Road for which he had also contracted—but when he heard that all were dead, he ordered the blacksmith to “set fire to all the buildings and utensils on the ground.” Soon a new crew was hired, and work was resumed, whereupon “the common grave was rounded up and a rough slam placed over the bodies of the unknown dead.” 24 Though the local newspapers did report an outbreak of cholera among the railroad workers, only eight or nine deaths were noted. One paper, the Village Record, even wrote a retraction to an earlier story (the issue has disappeared from the Chester County Historical Society’s archives), saying that “to prevent exaggeration, we deem it proper to state, that on the Railway … a fortnight ago, several cases of Cholera occurred, eight of which proved fatal—it then ceased suddenly as it commenced.” The paper added that the whole railroad line “has been, through the summer, with the few exceptions noted, remarkably healthy. a:malodorous=smelly; b:coincided= at the same time; c: combustible=easily set on fire; d:Popery=relating to the Roman Catholic Church; e: subversion=something which 2 destroys or ruins; f:adjacent=next to; g: money = best bet 25 A few months later, however, P&C Superintendent William Mitchell acknowledged that Duffy had been in “great difficulty and distress” on account of the fact that “nearly one half of his men died of Cholera.” That did not prevent Mitchell from calling the contractor a “perfect master of the art of complaining with or without cause.” No one ever said the Industrial Revolution was gentle. 26 Duffy was a wealthy man by the time he died in 1871 at age 88. His mansion still stands at 40th and Pine streets in West Philadelphia. 27 7 “We often wonder what it was like for him in his later years, as he’s sitting out on his porch,” says Bill Watson. “Is he pondering what had happened? Or is he just counting his money?” 28 Others remembered, quietly. In 1870, a group of railroad employees led by one Patrick Doyle built a small picket fence, within sight of the current tracks, as a memorial to the dead. By then the tracks had already been moved a few yards to the north by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), which bought the P&C in 1857. In 1909, Martin Clement, a PRR supervisor who would later become president of the railroad, replaced the fence with a square-shaped memorial wall made from stones that had supported the original tracks. After that, apart from modest individual efforts, the world pretty much forgot about Duffy’s Cut.… 29 Fast-forwarda to Labor Day weekend 2002. Bill and some other Watson family members had gathered for a cookout at Frank’s home in Freehold, New Jersey. Bill had brought a pile of files that had belonged to their Grandfather Tripician, and when they finished divvying up all the old railroad photos and newspaper clippings, Frank brought out something that their grandmother had given him after Grandpa Tripician passed away. 30 It was PRR file # 004.01 C, and it concerned something called Duffy’s Cut. 31 “I took one look at it and realized it was a hidden history connected to the very area where I had gotten a job” at Immaculata, says Bill. “I knew I had to find that spot. 32 ” Then something in the file caught his eye. It was the newspaper story from June 1889 by Julian Sachse titled “The Legend About Duffy’s Cut On the Pennsylvania Railroad Between Malvern and Frazer.” Transcribed on PRR letterhead as part of the official file, the story included a lengthy interview with an elderly area resident. 33 On a “warm murky night” in September 1832, just weeks after the Irishmen had been buried, the man recounted, he had been returning from the Green Tree Inn and was walking along the railroad. When he came to Duffy’s Fill, he told his interviewer: … the night was hot and foggy, so I trudged up between the stone blocks [the railroad sills, on which the tracks were laid] until I got on the fill, and there I [saw] with my own eyes the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a dancing around the big trench where they were buried … They looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire, and there they were a hopping and bobbing on their graves. 34 Sachse gently challenged the elderly resident, but the man insisted that “what he had seen were the disembodied spirits of the laborers who were buried in the trench.” And, he added: “I hadn’t been drinking no whiskey either that night.” 35 As soon as he read that story, Bill called his bagpiping friend Tom Conner and said, “I think I may have an explanation for what we saw that night. [In 2000, Bill and Tom had seen what looked like “illuminated figures” from Bill’s office window which looked toward Duffy’s Cut.] 36 ” File # 004.01 C—prosaically titled “History of ‘Duffy’s Cut’ Stone enclosure east of Malvern, Pa., which marks the burial place of 57 track laborers who were victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832”—was not supposed to be seen by outsiders. (A nephew of Clement’s recently told Bill Watson that as late as 1959, the PRR president “was telling people to keep it secret,” Watson recalls. “He remembers being called into Clement’s office to see this file—my grandfather was present—and he said, ‘This is what happened here, but you’re not to tell anybody.’”) 37 As the title made clear, the railroad’s own investigation concluded that 57 men—not eight or nine—had died, and the correspondence from PRR employees included some illuminating tidbitsb about the possible location of the bodies and the existence of primary-source materials. (One brief note says simply: “Miss Ogden says that her sisters diary shows entry in August 1832 she died of cholera at Fraser.”) 38 In a way, it’s surprising that the file exists at all. After all, why would a rising executive in a powerful corporation like the PRR put together a file of material related to disease and death along the railroad lines, and which might even lead to revelations of murder? 39 As Bill Watson tells it, there was a human connection that began in 1909 when Clement, then assistant supervisor at Paoli, was living in Malvern with an Irish family named Donahue. 40 “George Donahue’s wife, Bridget Doyle, was the sister of Patrick Doyle, the guy who put the first fence up at the site in 1870,” he explains. “So Clement heard about it from him. Doyle probably learned about it from the blacksmith, Harris, who was back in the area a couple decades later providing water and ballast for the railroad.” a: fast forward: moving ahead quickly b; illuminating tidbits: little pieces of knowledge which help a person understand something by shining light on it 3 41 Clement, who became president of the railroad in 1935, has evolved in Watson’s mind from a controlling, faintly sinister character who had kept the file secret to a sympathetic figure who had kept the story alive but had to keep it secret. (There were, Watson says, “well-placed people involved in this.”) 42 The whole story “would have been lost to history without Clement,” adds Frank. “He’s a key figure in making sure the story was preserved.” 43 Incidentally, when Clement had the stone wall built in 1909, he proposed that a plaquea be attached to it with the words: 57 men are buried here. Died with the cholera during the construction of the road in 1832. The proposal was turned down by the railroad as too expensive…… 44 It was a “convergence of folklore and railroad memory and science,” in Bill Watson’s words, that brought them to that spot on the old fill. The folklore part was the elderly resident’s ghost story, and whether or not you buy into the supernaturalb aspects, it does mark the spot where contemporary observers believed the burial site to be—one confirmed by the 1909 railroad memory of George Dougherty. The science part was Tim Bechtel, principal geophysicist for Enviroscan (a Lancaster County-based firm specializing in geophysical investigations), and his ground-penetrating radar… 45 When they got the intriguing GPR reading from Bechtel [suggesting the presence of human remains in the ground], it was the dead of winter and the ground was rock hard. But by March 2009 the earth had softened enough to let them resume digging. Finally, a few days after St. Patrick’s Day, one of the regular volunteers named Bob Frank hit what he describes as “weird colored soil, different from anything else” they had seen. There was something else: coffin nails. Then a tibia. Then a vertebra. And finally a section of very old track, just inches from a human skull. 46 [The skull numbered] SK001 is trying to tell us something. So are his comrades, [skulls numbered] SK002, SK006, and SK007. (SK003, -004, and -005 have kind of fallen to pieces, so we’ll leave them alone for now.) I don’t speak Skull, so I’ve asked Janet Monge to translate for me. Which is why she’s eyeballing the cranium of SK001 like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick. SK001 is saying My name is John Ruddy, Monge thinks. But she’s not positive. 47 Eighteen-year-old John Ruddy was the youngest of the young men from Donegal, Tyrone, and Derry who sailed to Philadelphia on the John Stamp in June 1832. From the unfused, zig-zag stitching along the skull that indicates immature facial development, Monge has deducedc that SK001 was a very young man. Other features suggest that he had also suffered from chronic ear infections and some “stressful phases” in his growth and development by the time he died. 48 He’s also missing his first molar, a one-in-a-million congenitald trait shared by quite a few members of the Ruddy family of Ireland. “ 49 I’m hesitant to say it’s really John Ruddy,” says Monge. “But at the moment, that seems like not a bad guess.” The next step involves DNA testing with Ruddy relatives. 50 Whoever he is, SK001 seems to have been “bonked on the head,” as Monge puts it for us laymen. There’s a “little diddle” on his skull, she explains, which suggests peri-mortem trauma, even if it’s not exactly conclusive. 51 SK002 has a more pronounced “bash,” along with the kind of “plastic distortion” that indicates that it happened “when the bone was like it is in life—full of collagen and mineral,” she says. “It’s very directed at a very particular place.” 52 Though both skulls indicated possible violence, neither was conclusivee enough for Monge to be comfortable with words like murder. The other three remains they found last year were “too fragmentaryf to really do anything with” (though she does offer the very tentativeg and intriguingh possibility that one of them may have been female). 53 The discovery that at least some of the workers had been buried in coffins lends itself to multiple interpretations. “ 54 It meant that someone took care to make sure that they were buried properly,” says Bill Watson. “It’s a little better than just throwing them into a pit. But now that we found out they were murdered, it’s even more horrible than any of us could have ever imagined.” In his view, it’s another piece of a literal and figurative cover-up. “ 55 The tough part is staying completely impartial and objective,” says Cox. “We have to let our findings speak for themselves and tell their story, rather than trying to fit the evidence to the existing story that has been told for the last 175 years. Since it’s such a sensational tale, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that we have to consider all the possibilities, not just the brutal murder scenario.” … 56 This past July, the crew found two more sets of remains. This time, the skulls were speaking loud and clear. 57 “When we started to take out skeletons 6 and 7, the trauma became even more dramatic,” says Monge. “That’s why we moved from a hesitant, ‘trauma associated with that’ [assessment] to one in which we are really convinced.” a: plaque=a sign; b: supernatural = beyond science, like a miracle; c: deduced=figured out based on evidence; d: congenital=inherited, genetic; 4 e: conclusive=definite; f: fragmentary: sketchy, in pieces; g: tentative=not defimite or sure, experimental; h: intruiguing=interesting 58 Usually, blunt-force trauma comes from an object with a large surface area, which “doesn’t make that sort of characteristic indentation and break that you would see with a tool,” she explains. “In the case of skeleton 6, the trauma is thin, long, and narrow—it’s shaped very much like an ax. And another trauma that we cleaned off may actually be a bullet [hole].” The only reason she says may “is because these low-velocity lead bullets that came out of basically musket-like guns don’t have the same kind of characteristics that a high-velocity, rotating bullet coming out of a modern firearm would have.” 59 Recently they got another piece of information, courtesy of a magnetometer. “ 60 The Schoenstedt magnetometer has shown metal in the skull of SK006,” Monge wrote in an email early last month. The team was still waiting for the results of the X-ray, which would indicate exactly where in the skull the metal is located, she added. “It keeps getting more and more interesting.” 61 Whether the Duffy’s Cut Project will find the remains of all 57 Irishmen remains to be seen. They’re hopeful that the main cachea is just a little farther to the west, near a small ravine. If they do find those remains, or even if they don’t, they’ll take what they have to West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd and give them a proper burial, complete with a Celtic cross and, undoubtedly, some plaintive bagpiping. 62 As for Bill Watson, he’s still digging, in archives as well as in the old railroad fill, still hoping that the 1832 diary of Miss Mary Ogden or some other primary-source material will surface and shed new light on what happened that summer. And while he’s keenly aware of the potential hits to a scholarly reputation, he’s still not backing down from what he saw that night 10 years ago. “ 63 John Ahtes believed, and I believed, that this whole thing started with [the ghosts of the 57] men reaching out for someone to help them,” he says. “I mean, that was the only way that we could have actually realized what that [PRR] [Pennsylvania Railroad] file really represented. I don’t know how else to explain it. “ 64 I don’t think Catholics can say that there’s a world without spirits without sounding like an atheist,” he adds. “You know, there’s something out there. Do they ever come through the veil? I think they may.” a: cache= hiding place b: hits = [slang] damage 5 CAPSTONE PROJECT, Part 2 Due in 3 parts: (1) Wednesday, Dec. 3; (2) Friday, Dec.5; (3) Monday, Dec. 8: 60 points in all No late submissions! See the first page for instructions in the case of an emergency. Your name _____________________________________ Document 1: “A journey into Philadelphia’s immigrant past” [a radio interview aired by a Philadelphia radio station] Document 2: “Pa. Mass Grave of Sick Irish Railroad Workers May Be Murder Scene” [posting on an Irish website] Document 3: “The Bones Beneath the Tracks” [a graphic and an article from the Gazette, a magazine for University of Pennsylvania alumni. It is a full account of the history of Duffy’s Cut and the work done by scientists and archeologists. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 13 POINTS: DUE WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – Turn in this project sheet, page 1. Document 1: an interview on a Philadelphia radio station 1. The young Irish men at Duffy’s Cut were working to build a railroad. What was the location and time period? 2. In paragraphs 3 and 4, Watson and Ahtes say there are two ways the Irish workers might have died. List the two ways. Then label them fact or opinion. 3. This interview mentions several different primary sources used by the team of historians, archeologists, and scientists. List at least 5 different primary sources mentioned in paragraphs 3-8. Document 2: a web posting for readers in Ireland 4. List 3 words or phrases used by the author in the title, subtitle, and opening paragraph which set a tone of suspicion and violence. 5. List at least 3 pieces of evidence from the article which suggest possible murder. [Include the paragraph numbers] 6. List phrases which offer evidence that someone showed “care and concern” for the dead workers. [Include the paragraph numbers.] 1 your name ___________________________________________ 15 POINTS: DUE FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5 – Turn in this project sheet, page 2. Document 3: “The Bones Beneath the Tracks” [ ¶ means paragraph.] 1. In the beginning of the article, the writer compares the work to a “jigsaw puzzle.” What does he mean? What would the “pieces” be? 2. In Document 1, ¶3 and Document 3, ¶14, the author says that cholera arrived in Philadelphia at the same time as “large waves of Irish Catholic immigrants.” Explain why this timing caused a very dangerous situation for the Irish. 3. In ¶17, Julian Sachse says that some of the healthy workers tried to get away from the place where they were living because other workers were sick with cholera. Based on the reports in an 1889 newspaper article, he says that “the neighboring population was … violently pro-active…” The term proactive refers to taking action before something happens. Using information from this section of the article and from Documents 1 and 2, draw an inference about possible actions of people living near the work site. Explain how they may have been “violently proactive.” What violent actions may they have taken? Include evidence with paragraph numbers. 4. Document 3 includes a number of people from Philadelphia and the surrounding area. The author describes some of them as “heroes,” some as “villains”* and others as somewhere in between. [*a villain is an evil person.] a. Who were two of the heroes? Why did he call them heroes? [Include paragraph numbers.] b. Duffy’s Cut is named after Philip Duffy. After reading the entire article, explain (1) who Duffy was, (2) why Watson, the historian, would consider him a potential “villain,” and (3) what happened to Duffy at the end of his life. For each comment you make about Duffy, include a paragraph number. Be sure you identify references to Duffy from several different locations in the article. 2 your name ___________________________________________ 22 POINTS: DUE MONDAY, DECEMBER 5 – Turn in these project sheets, pages 3 and 4. ** 10 MORE POINTS: you will ALSO turn in the three documents for an annotation grade AND answer a question in class about Duffy’s Cut. Be ready to use evidence from the documents to explain what you think happened at Duffy’s Cut. Document 3: “The Bones Beneath the Tracks” [ ¶ means paragraph.] 5. In ¶44 Watson says it was a “convergence [a coming together] of folklore and railroad memory and science” that helped them find the skeletons in Duffy’s cut in the first place. Explain specifically what he meant by each of these three different factors. 6. William [Bill] Watson is a university professor. Near the end of the article, in ¶62, the author says that Watson is “not backing down from what he saw [from his window] that night 10 years ago” even though it might hurt his reputation. Drawing an inference based on the facts you are given, explain why Watson’s reputation as a professor might be hurt if he tells other professors what he believes he saw. 7. In ¶ 7- 9 of Document 3, the writer explains why Duffy’s Cut is important. Also, in ¶7 of Document 1, “A journey into Philadelphia’s Past,” historian Hankey says it is a “rare find.” Using both Document 1 and Document 3, list 3 reasons Duffy’s Cut is so important. Include paragraph numbers. 8. The graphic: look carefully at the graphic from the cover of The Gazette. Explain how the graphic reinforces the themes related to the incident at Duffy’s Cut and the tone of the overall investigation. 3 9. Make connections. Review your notes on Takaki packet sections (1) 3b in which Takaki talks about common immigrant experiences and (2) 3c where you read about the experiences of Irish immigrants in the U.S. In what ways are the events at Duffy’s Cut similar to typical experiences faced by many Irish immigrants? List several specific items of information from Takaki to support your answer. For each item from Takaki, list the page number. 10. TIME LINE with 3 columns On the bottom OR the back of this page, using all three articles, make a time line in which you list at least 5 significant dates between 1829 and 1870 which are related to the Duffy’s Cut incident. Note: Some of these dates may take place during the same year. In the 2nd column, next to each date, include a brief explanation. [for example, “RR building begins.”] Use abbreviations. In the 3rd column, next to your explanation, identify the primary document or source for each item if it is given [for example, ship’s log]. Include the title and a thesis for your time line. Time Line for Events Related to Duffy’s Cut Thesis: Date What happened Primary source used by the writer of the article 4 Your name: _______________________________________________________________ MONDAY, 12/8: 10 points for annotation and your answer to the question below. When you are done answering, turn in all your materials: (1) your project sheets, (2) the documents with your annotations, and (3) your answer to the question below. What happened at Duffy’s Cut? In ¶55 of Document 3, one of the archeologists says that “the tough part is staying completely impartial and objective…[to] let our findings speak for themselves and tell their story…” Now it is up to you to review the information and figure out the “story” of what happened at Duffy’s Cut. Did all of the Irish railway workers die of cholera? Were some of them murdered? Or…? Write a complete paragraph in which you explain your theory of what happened. Begin with your thesis; then support your thesis with evidence from the readings. 5
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer


Anonymous
I was stuck on this subject and a friend recommended Studypool. I'm so glad I checked it out!

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Related Tags