Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1
In September of 2000, history professor Dr. William "Bill" Watson of Immaculata University stopped by the campus for a break with friend and fellow bagpipe musician Tom Connor during a long drive back from a performance.\xa0 While there, around 10:00 p.m. near the typically deserted faculty center lawn, both men witnessed a strange apparition that would later lead to a remarkable and meaningful coincidence.\xa0 Two years after this experience, Bill's twin brother, Reverend Dr. Frank Watson, by chance, came across a file once kept by their grandfather Joseph Tripician, a former secretary to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1970s.\xa0 One official record in this file documented a tragedy connected to a ghost story their grandfather told annually at Thanksgiving dinner.\xa0 The report outlined a mass death of workers on an arduous stretch of the then Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad in the summer and fall of 1832.\xa0 Contractor Phillip Duffy had hired 57 Irish immigrants to lay the tracks for roughly a mile through thickset trees and over a deep ravine about 20 miles west of Philadelphia.\xa0 39 newly arrived immigrants, one of them a woman, and 18 others already working there would all be dead within ninety days of their hire.\xa0 Irish Catholic immigrants were often viewed with prejudice as unseemly and unwelcome intruders by established society and expendable workers by the railroad and mining companies profiting from their cheap and desperate labor.\xa0 When the second global cholera pandemic reached this work camp, the record suggested that all 57 had succumbed to the deadly disease.\xa0 Compelled by the discovery of this document, in August 2004, Bill and Frank Watson, along with two university associates, led an archaeological excavation to find the accurate burial site for these victims.\xa0 On March 24, 2009, it was announced that the first human remains had been found.\xa0 However, a curious twist was discovered by noted physical and forensic anthropologist Janet Monge, who analyzed the bones.\xa0 Her examination revealed that at least two of the skulls found first likely received perimortem blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds.\xa0 This conclusion leads to the prominent theory that workers were either killed out of fear they would spread the contagion, to quell a rebellion or both.\xa0 Please join us for part one of a story that yearns to be told, the Massacre at Duffy's Cut.
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