Duffy's Cut 57 ... Massacre?

If you drive into Bala Cynwyd’s West Laurel Hill Cemetery (sister cemetery to Historic Laurel Hill in Philadelphia), past the office and funeral home, you’ll drive right toward a ten-foot-high limestone Celtic Cross, which adorns a monument covered in Irish symbolism. Much has been written about Duffy's Cut over the past few years, so I will not go into great detail here (please visit the links at the end if you would like to further educate yourself). The story is worth keeping alive for a number of reasons, like that of the Holocaust. The main reason being how we Americans oppressed the unfortunate during our capitalistic heyday around the Industrial Revolution. No, I’m not talking about how we killed off the natives of the Hawaiian Islands for imperialistic gain, or pressed into service Welsh and German immigrants to work the coal mines. I'm talking about a small select group of Irish immigrants who were brought to America in 1856 to work on building the railroads.

According to Immaculata University’s website (which sponsored the Duffy’s Cut project):

“In 1832, a group of 57 Irish immigrants from Donegal, Tyrone, and Derry arrived in Philadelphia. They were brought to Chester County by a fellow Irishman named Philip Duffy as laborers for the construction of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, Pennsylvania’s pioneering railroad. Within six weeks, all were dead of cholera and possibly violence, and were buried anonymously in a ditch outside of Malvern.”

Malvern, a western suburb of Philadelphia (in East Whiteland township, as indicated on the memorial), has very hilly terrain and at the time was densely wooded. Immigrant workers were brought in since the work was very dangerous. There was extreme prejudice against any kind of immigrants and so these people were treated as expendable resources by the railroad companies. Some of the 57 workers died of cholera (they would have received no medical care from their employer, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad) and some were murdered. Phillip Duffy’s blacksmith buried all 57 workers in a shallow ditch beside the railroad bed.

According to the article “The Deaths at Duffy's Cut: Cholera or Cover-up?” (crimelibrary.com), “Between the summer of 1832 and the spring of 1833 a cholera epidemic ravaged the east coast of the U.S. At its worst, the disease killed as many as 80 people a day in Philadelphia…” Some have hypothesized “that local vigilantes, spurred by a blend of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigotry and fear of a deadly epidemic, may have murdered many of the Irish workers.” Locals have claimed to have seen the workers’ ghosts dancing on their own mass grave and paranormal investigations have even occurred. As far back as 1909 newspapers reported people seeing specters “as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves...” (ref.) 

Official records of the deaths at Duffy’s Cut remained locked in the vaults of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the company which evolved from the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad. The records were found by accident by Reverend Dr. Frank Watson when the company went bankrupt in 1970. Watson’s brother William was a Professor of History at Immaculata University (which is located near Malvern, PA). Their grandfather had actually worked for the railroad and would tell them stories of the ghosts of Irishmen who danced on the graves alongside the railroad tracks in Malvern. After the grandfather’s death, the Watsons found the original records. Then they went digging – literally.

William Watson at the Duffy's Cut site in Malvern, PA (ref.)

Excavation of the ditch began in 2004 under the direction of William E. Watson, and in 2009 the first human bones were found in the mass grave. Irish pipes and other artifacts were found as well. Blunt trauma was noted on two of the skulls and there is evidence that some of the bones were struck by projectiles such as bullets. It appears to have been a massacre, for whatever reason. The bones of John Ruddy, the youngest of the Duffy’s Cut 57, died there at the age of eighteen. According to the New York Times, he finally received a proper burial in 2013:

“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.”


Laid to Rest in West Laurel Hill Cemetery 

Funeral for five of the exploited "Duffy's Cut" railroad laborers

I learned of Duffy’s Cut quite by accident. A friend of mine who works at Philadelphia’s Historic Laurel Hill Cemetery told me about the dedication (in 2012) to the Duffy’s Cut 57 at West Laurel (Belmont Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, PA). I took a ride over and found the flags still lined up around the crypt cover. I missed the memorial service by a day, I think. If you watch this video (link below), you’ll be quite moved, I’m sure, by the serious and heartfelt ceremony, not to mention the small coffins which hold the remains to be buried:

Click here to watch the YouTube video of the memorial ceremony at West Laurel Hill Cemetery: Duffy's Cut viewing, memorial service and burial in West Laurel Hill Cemetery.

According to Wikipedia:
“On March 9, 2012, the remains of five men and one woman from those who died at Duffy's Cut Shanty Town were laid to rest in a respectable church burial at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. The men and woman were unearthed by researchers from Immaculata University at the location of the Shanty Town near an Amtrak railroad line in Pennsylvania. A sixth body was recovered and identified as John Ruddy from Inishowen, County Donegal; his remains were returned to Ireland for reburial there. Excavation of the deep burial site was halted when Amtrak, which owns the land, would not issue permits for additional digging because of the site's proximity to the railroad tracks."

Monument at West Laurel Hill, shortly after dedication

(Would not issue PERMITS ...?) Below the huge limestone Celtic cross here at West Laurel Hill lie the buried remains of five men and one woman, all members of that unfortunate lot, possibly the victims of mass murder - the Duffy’s Cut 57. The other names on the crypt cover are from the ship’s roster (the John Stamp), and if excavation under the tracks is someday allowed by Amtrak, their remains may be buried here as well. As Bill Watson, director of the Duffy's cut project puts it: "Every human being deserves to be remembered (ref.)"

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Never forget what we’ve done to our fellow man in the name of “progress.” The evidence points toward a massacre of these unfortunate people, 57 Irish immigrants who came here in search of the American Dream.

References and Further Reading:
For the most comprehensive account of the Duffy’s Cut deaths: The Deaths at Duffy's Cut: Cholera or Cover-up?
Images from the PBS documentary, "Death on the Railroad"
The Duffy's Cut Project on the Immaculata University website
The Ghosts of Duffy’s cut YouTube video (RTE documentary)
New York Times article: With Shovels and Science, a Grim Story Is Told
West Laurel Hill Cemetery website
West Laurel Hill Cemetery Honors Irish Railroad Workers of Duffy’s Cut with One Year Memorial Service
Long-forgotten dead of Duffy's Cut get proper rites

PBS "Secrets of the Dead: Death on the Railroad" DVD

Shooting Film, by Accident

I put myself through an interesting little photographic exercise last week. I call it “Forgetting your digital cameras and being forced to use film.” I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

Last week I planned to spend an hour at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.  I threw the photo gear in the trunk of my car and drove the ten miles or so out to the cemetery on a gorgeous Spring day. Well, when I arrived, I realized all I had in the trunk of the car were my Nikon F3 and a couple of Holgas – nothing digital! Not even a camera phone! How could I have done this? Well, when you have the attention span of a gnat, it’s rather easy (so many cemeteries, so little time!). I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen to me more often.

I had to decide whether to a make a go of it or come back another time. After a moment of reflection, I decided to accept my fate − I crossed the Rubicon. After all, prior to the digital revolution, I had lived for thirty years on the film side of the Rubicon! How difficult could it be?

If you are as skilled at shooting film as you are using digital, the only major annoyance is that you cannot immediately upload your image files to Facebook, email them to friends, or play with them in Photoshop. You need to get the film developed and scanned. This takes at least days, if not weeks! Luckily I have a wonderful photo processing lab within walking distance of where I work in center city Philadelphia – Philadelphia Photographics (and yes, they accept mail order). They do high quality work fast and cheap, so I got my scanned negatives back in a few days. The images from that day are sprinkled throughout this article (square ones are from 120mm film in the Holga, vertical images from the Nikon).

Film Can be Annoying!

There are a number of minor annoyances associated with film:

• There is no instant feedback via an LCD display to show you how badly you messed up. 
• Your ISO is limited to the film you just loaded in the camera. 
• You have a finite number of images on a roll of film.  
• It’s expensive to get film processed, printed, and/or scanned – not to mention time-consuming. 

Holga image, West River Drive

However, if you turn those annoyances around, they can easily be seen as advantages (I can rationalize just about anything). Not knowing what you’ve just shot (and whether anything will come out) can add an element of nervous excitement and surprise to your work (still, do yourself a favor and bracket your exposures!) Having to choose a film with appropriate speed for your lighting conditions makes you appreciate the flexibility of digital, where one image can be made at ISO 100 and the next at 1600. (I had to forgo some great mausoleum stained glass images as I had chosen to use 100 speed film.) Having a finite number of exposures (36 for my Nikon SLR and 12 in my Holga) forced me to pace myself and make each shot count.

I realized at the outset that I would have to concentrate on not wasting film − essentially by composing shots, focusing critically, and metering for proper exposure. These are things we tend not to bother with anymore – we just set the digital on auto and blast off a string of images.

What I Learned Using My Film Cameras

Having shot both film and digital for the past seven years, I have become quite reliant on digital for my documentary and snapshot images, using only the more expensive film gear for serious work. It is amazing that in 2012 you still need to spend thousands of dollars on digital equipment in order to replicate the image quality of a five-dollar disposable film camera with ISO 100 film! 

Film Cameras and Lenses

And speaking of image quality, my Holgas create fabulous lo-fi distortion that would cost hundreds of dollars in DSLR attachments to replicate. My Nikon F3 SLR has a lens assortment that is unparalleled in my digital world. I never purchased digital equivalents of my 28mm or 55mm Macro Nikkor lenses, as the cost would be astronomical. So it was with great pleasure that I got to use a true wide angle and a sharp macro that focuses down to an inch! The vertical image of the names on the Irish memorial was made with the 28mm lens – not something I could have done with my 28mm - 135mm digital lens (whose wide end has about a 38mm film lens equivalency). [That conversion business is rather complicated – I have a good explanation of it in my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient, available from Amazon.com.]

Focus

The Nikon F3 has a fabulously big, bright viewfinder that makes manual focusing a joy. Digital doesn’t come close. Unless you’ve shot film extensively, you wouldn’t remember that old film lenses had nearly a full-barrel focus rotation (from close-up to infinity), meaning you have very critical control over the exact focus of your image. Digital lenses typically don’t allow that – in an effort to drain less battery power as a lens auto-focuses, lens manufacturers have minimized the barrel rotation distance from close-up to infinity. So if you’ve ever tried to manually focus a “digital” lens, you quickly realize it’s next to impossible – the range of barrel rotation from close-up to infinity is usually only a quarter of the full 360-degree rotation.  

Depth of Field

Shooting with my fast “film” lenses also gives me much better control over depth of field. That is, I can shoot at f2 and have certain objects in focus while making those in the background blurry. This is usually not possible with digital cameras, since the lenses aren’t as fast. For other optical reasons, point-and-shoot digitals are notorious for having an infinite depth of field (everything from 3 feet to Mars is sharply in focus), which you really don’t want all the time. (Manufacturers have begun making faster digital lenses; however, they are very expensive. An f2.8 28mm “digital” version of my Nikkor film lens costs $500!)

More about Film

Mausoleum at 28mm

There are mysteries and dangers involved in film use. The mystery is whether or not your film will come out the way you want it to. The danger, that you have far less control over salvaging a bad film image than you do a digital one (photo editing programs can manipulate the extensive digital information of a RAW or JPEG file much more effectively than they can the relatively limited digital information acquired from a scanned negative). Also, slide film (which I use) has far less exposure latitude (has higher contrast) than digital images so it’s way more difficult to tweak a scanned Ektachrome image if you need to make minor adjustments in a photo editing program. (The images you see here were made on Kodak Ektachrome color slide and Kodak T-Max 100 black and white films).

Changing film slows you down. Another way to look at this is it forces you not to burst off ten digital images of everything you see! Multiply this by different angles, different exposures, and choosing monochrome and color, and you can easily see how people can shoot twenty digital images of the same scene. Since a roll of film holds way fewer images than a memory card, film forces you to concentrate on the final image. So as an alternative to ripping off a burst of twenty digital snapshots, why not just concentrate on making one good photograph? (I write about this in the chapter, “Possibilities Beyond the Snapshot,” in Digital Photography for the Impatient.) There really is no need to fill up all those hard drives with bad photos, now is there?

One last thing about film: unless you’re using a full-frame DSLR (in the five thousand dollar range), the resolution of your digital images is far lower than what you get with film. When I shoot a roll of 120mm film in my twenty-five-dollar Holga, I get resolution comparable to that created by a $40,000 medium format digital camera. Film has INFINITE resolution. Forget that 2300 x 3400 pixel stuff – film grain is analog and infinite!

Epilogue (Rest in Peace?):  

"Kodak stops producing slide film due to lack of demand" (March 3, 2012)

Purchase Ed's book,  “Digital Photography for the Impatient,” from Amazon.com