Secrets of Duffy’s Cut Yield to Shovel and Science

 

(NYTimes) 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 that 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. Continued

Photo by smallbones 

 

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum

 

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum at Lemmon Street is a historic site that celebrates the history of the immense Irish presence in Southwest Baltimore City in the late 1840's. The museum officially opened on June 17th, 2002. This site consists of a group of 5 alley houses where the Irish immigrants who worked for the adjoining B&O Railroad lived. Two of the houses, 918 and 920 Lemmon St., are the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum. The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum are the centerpiece of a larger historical district that includes the B&O Railroad Museum, St. Peter the Apostle Church, the Hollins Street Market, and St. Peter the Apostle Cemetery. The museum is a project of the Railroad Historical District Corporation, a non-profit organization. Continued 

A Sauerkraut Thanksgiving

 

(Bon Appétit) ... I didn't know what to say that day to explain our tradition, but I've since done some research, and I now know where it comes from: Baltimore. Serving sauerkraut at Thanksgiving is an old tradition there, rooted in the homes of the city's German immigrants. In 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, about a quarter of Baltimore's population was German. Sauerkraut was a given on their celebratory table, and so it became a common part of Thanksgiving meals across the city. Over time, it didn't even matter if you came from German stock: Sauerkraut became a Baltimore thing. My grandfather's family was as Irish as they come—Mack was their surname, a shortened version of Macgillycuddy—but he grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, eating sauerkraut on the fourth Thursday of every November. Continued

{Falmanac slow-cooks his Thanksgiving sauerkraut with spareribs and caraway seeds.}

Photo: Making sauerkraut c1915 (Library of Congress).

‘Copper’ Resurrects the Five Points

(NYTimes) ... Ostensibly the new series is about a former boxer and Civil War veteran turned police detective, Kevin Corcoran (played by Tom Weston-Jones), an Irish immigrant who returns to the Five Points after serving in the Union Army’s 71st Regiment to find his daughter dead and his wife missing. New York is really the main character.
Where “Gangs” signed up as technical adviser Luc Sante, whose 1991 book “Low Life” evoked “The Gangs of New York,” Herbert Asbury’s 1928 nonfiction confection, “Copper” is rooted in fiction — Jack Finney’s “Time and Again,” which Ms. Wayne read in high school at Manhattan’s Hewitt School, and “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr, which she read more recently (as well as “Low Life”). But the creative team also decided to hire a full-fledged historian, Daniel Czitrom, who teaches American cultural and political history at Mount Holyoke, to keep “Copper” believable. (Mr. Fontana is himself a self-styled would-be historian who started college as a history major.) Continued

Cardinal James Gibbons

(LoC) Roman Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons, champion of labor and advocate of the separation of church and state, was born to Irish immigrants in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 23, 1834.
Not long after his birth, Gibbons' ailing father moved the family back to Ireland at his doctor's suggestion. After his father's death in 1847, Gibbons' mother decided to move her family back to the United States. Continued

America's Journey Stories on display at Abingdon library beginning Saturday

(Aegis) For the first time, Harford County will host an official Smithsonian exhibit when Journey Stories, a look at how and why Americans have traveled since the country's inception, opens at the Abingdon library Saturday.
The exhibit, which will be open though July 6, focuses on themes of immigration, migration and transportation and how these aspects shaped the nation.
The exhibit, which will open at 9:30 a.m., will be divided into different sections for each theme and include items such as panels, photographs and maps, Bethany Hacker, community relations specialist for Harford County Public Library, said. Continued

Researchers unable to unearth mass grave at Duffy's Cut

MALVERN, Pa. (AP) The Irish immigrants building a stretch of railroad near Philadelphia in 1832 had been in the U.S. only a few weeks when they died — ostensibly of cholera — and were unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave. Their families never knew what happened to them.
Nearly 180 years later, local researchers say they have a clearer picture of the men's fate. Continued

The proof is in the pickle

(NYTimes) ... No immigrant food was more reviled than the garlicky, vinegary pickle. Pungent beyond all civilized standards, toxic to both the stomach and the psyche, the pickle was seen as morally suspect. As Dr. Susanna Way Dodds wrote in the late 19th century, “the spices in it are bad, the vinegar is a seething mass of rottenness ... and the poor little innocent cucumber ... if it had very little ‘character’ in the beginning, must now fall into the ranks of the ‘totally depraved.’ ”
... Their cheap price tag made pickles enormously popular with the working class. Immigrant mothers gave them to babies to gnaw on, a kind of edible teething ring. Every weekday, when the neighborhood schools let out for lunch, Lower East Side children raced to the nearest pushcart or deli for a meal of penny pickles and a handful of candy. Continued

The American Colonization Society

(LoC) Joseph Jenkins Roberts declared Liberia, formerly a colony of the American Colonization Society, an independent republic on July 26, 1847. He was elected the first president of the republic in 1848.A native of Petersburg, Virginia, Roberts immigrated to Liberia in 1829 at the age of twenty under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. The Society was organized in late December 1816 by a group which included Henry Clay, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Bushrod Washington, and Daniel Webster. The colonization scheme, controversial from the outset among blacks and whites alike, was conceived as an alternative to emancipation. Continued

Image: Joseph Jenkins Roberts (Library of Congress).

The Acadian Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement)

(Wikipedia) The Expulsion of the Acadians (also known as the Great Upheaval, the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, Le Grand Dérangement) was the forced population transfer of the Acadian people from present day Canadian Maritime provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (an area known as Acadie to the French). The Expulsion occurred during the French and Indian War. They were deported to other British colonies, Britain, and France, between 1755 and 1763.

... The deportees in Maryland received the best treatment of those deported in part due to the Acadians' shared religion with the colonists of Maryland. In Maryland fellow Catholics from Ireland greeted over 900 Acadian deportees. The local newspaper requested the Acadians be shown “Christian charity.” The charity was intended as private aid and no government sanctioned relief was offered. The Acadians in Maryland tended to fare well in relation to their kin in the other colonies with a substantial portion of them residing in a Baltimore suburb known as Frenchtown. Yet, even in Catholic Maryland private charity was inadequate and some groups went without shelter. Less than a year after le Grand Dérangement, legislation was passed in Maryland, which authorized the imprisonment of homeless Acadians and the “binding out” of their children to other families. Continued

Image: "View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown looking down Elk Creek" by Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Cardinal James Gibbons

(LoC) Roman Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons, champion of labor and advocate of the separation of church and state, was born to Irish immigrants in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 23, 1834.
Not long after his birth, Gibbons' ailing father moved the family back to Ireland at his doctor's suggestion. After his father's death in 1847, Gibbons' mother decided to move her family back to the United States. Continued

A cut above Duffy's

... A tulip poplar tree estimated at 130 feet, sitting above the remains of an Irish rail worker, was felled to allow researchers to get to the skeleton. The tree-felling was the latest event in the continuing work to discover the secrets of Duffy's Cut, the grave of as many as 57 trackworkers who died of cholera and possibly human hands in August 1832. Continued

The Molly Maguires

(Providence College) The "Molly Maguires" were miners in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania who organized into a union during the 1860's and 1870's. These miners were chiefly, although not exclusively, Irish and the union was called the Workingmen's Benevolent Association. In general, the members of this union were also members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semi-secret fraternal society, which had its origin in Ireland as a completely secret and anonymous association.
This organization of Irish miners was dubbed the "Molly Maguires," after a group of Irish peasants who dressed up as women to antagonize their landlords. This group was infamously known as murderers and assassins and the press and police in America applied the name to the Irish miners. The label was used by both the press and the owner-operators of the mining companies to their distinct advantage. They called anyone who was pro-union a "Molly," inferring that they were criminals at best. This helped to subdue, even if only slightly, uprisings in the work place. The conditions of the mines were horrendous: there were no provisions for safety nor proper ventilation within the pits. Mine inspectors were figments of the imagination - not until 1870 was legislation passed mandating a second exit for escape in case of explosion, fire, cave-in, etc.
The legislature was largely under the influence of the coal mine operators and ignored the workers, as the mine owners perceived them as having no power. The initiative behind the eventual passage of the 1870 legislation was the Avondale fire in 1869, in which 179 men died. Even then, however, it was only in Schuylkill County that this legislation was passed, which stated there must be a second opening, force ventilation, and the appointment of state mine inspectors.
These laws were, however, extremely weak and rarely enforced. It was not until a mine operator was one of the men killed in a severe explosion in the Ravensdale Collier in the Pottsville district that a need was finally seen for the grievances the miners had been voicing for years. In Schuylkill County alone, 566 miners were killed and 1665 maimed in seven years. Continued

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum

The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum at Lemmon Street is a historic site that celebrates the history of the immense Irish presence in Southwest Baltimore City in the late 1840's. The museum officially opened on June 17th, 2002. This site consists of a group of 5 alley houses where the Irish immigrants who worked for the adjoining B&O Railroad lived. Two of the houses, 918 and 920 Lemmon St., are the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum. The Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum are the centerpiece of a larger historical district that includes the B&O Railroad Museum, St. Peter the Apostle Church, the Hollins Street Market, and St. Peter the Apostle Cemetery. The museum is a project of the Railroad Historical District Corporation, a non-profit organization. Continued

The Capitulation Protocol

(LoC) According to the terms of the capitulation protocol of January 26, 1654, Portugal decreed that Jewish and Dutch settlers had three months to leave Brazil. Approximately 150 Jewish families of Portuguese descent fled the Brazilian city of Recife, in the state of Pernambuco. By September, twenty-three of these refugees had established the first community of Jews in New Amsterdam.
Known as Sephardim (Jews of Spanish-Portuguese extraction), theirs was a complex saga. Continued

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

(NYTBR) ... Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What linked them together, Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. It is no surprise, therefore, to find census data showing that blacks who left the South had far more schooling than blacks who stayed. Or that the migrants had higher employment numbers than Northern-born blacks and a more stable family life, as shown by lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of marriage. Put simply, Wilkerson says, the well-known “migrant advantage” has worked historically for Americans of all colors. Continued

Image: Saint Augustine, Florida. Trainman signalling from a "Jim Crow" coach, 1943, by Gordon Parks (FSA/OWI/Library Congress).

The Acadian Expulsion (Le Grand Dérangement)

(Wikipedia) The Expulsion of the Acadians (also known as the Great Upheaval, the Great Expulsion, The Deportation, the Acadian Expulsion, Le Grand Dérangement) was the forced population transfer of the Acadian people from present day Canadian Maritime provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (an area known as Acadie to the French). The Expulsion occurred during the French and Indian War. They were deported to other British colonies, Britain, and France, between 1755 and 1763.

... The deportees in Maryland received the best treatment of those deported in part due to the Acadians' shared religion with the colonists of Maryland. In Maryland fellow Catholics from Ireland greeted over 900 Acadian deportees. The local newspaper requested the Acadians be shown “Christian charity.” The charity was intended as private aid and no government sanctioned relief was offered. The Acadians in Maryland tended to fare well in relation to their kin in the other colonies with a substantial portion of them residing in a Baltimore suburb known as Frenchtown. Yet, even in Catholic Maryland private charity was inadequate and some groups went without shelter. Less than a year after le Grand Dérangement, legislation was passed in Maryland, which authorized the imprisonment of homeless Acadians and the “binding out” of their children to other families. Continued

Image: "View from the Packet Wharf at Frenchtown looking down Elk Creek" by Benjamin Henry Latrobe

The Jews Who Tamed The Wild West

(Jewish Week) Growing up in the east — the product of suburban shuls and summer camp — I didn’t hear a lot of stories about bubbies and zaydes on horseback herding cattle, or great uncles at rail depots fighting off dusty desperados in cowboy America.
So I was deeply and pleasantly surprised to meet so many colorful and fascinating frontier Jews while researching the life of revolutionary businessman Fred Harvey.
Harvey was the founding father of the American hospitality industry, and his multigenerational family business, running a chain of trackside restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe railroad from Chicago to Los Angeles starting in the 1870s, was said to have civilized the Wild West.
One of the many lessons I needed to learn about American history is just how much more diverse and multicultural this country was far earlier than many of us have been taught. Continued

Image: Harvey House, Belen, New Mexico (Kim Choate/MDRails)

97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

(NYTimes) ... “97 Orchard” dispels a pile of myths about immigrant foodstuffs. Corned beef and cabbage isn’t an Irish invention. Gefilte fish and challah did not originate with the Jews. She tracks the immigrant origins of many well-known brands — Breakstone’s, Fleischmann’s — and she is not a snob about time-saving inventions. Beginning in 1911, Crisco began to replace schmaltz (chicken fat) in many Jewish kitchens. Ms. Ziegelman writes about the harried kosher cook and imagines “the freedom awaiting her in the blue-and-white can.” Continued

Image by Bernarda Bryson Shahn (Library of Congress).

Independence Day

(LoC) Joseph Jenkins Roberts declared Liberia, formerly a colony of the American Colonization Society, an independent republic on July 26, 1847. He was elected the first president of the republic in 1848.A native of Petersburg, Virginia, Roberts immigrated to Liberia in 1829 at the age of twenty under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. The Society was organized in late December 1816 by a group which included Henry Clay, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Bushrod Washington, and Daniel Webster. The colonization scheme, controversial from the outset among blacks and whites alike, was conceived as an alternative to emancipation. Continued

Image: Joseph Jenkins Roberts (Library of Congress).