Paddy on the Railway

The above photo was taken at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10th, 1869 when the golden spike was driven, uniting the transcontinental railway. Simultaneous with the driving of the spike, thousands of Irish laborers were fired.

When the great mass migration of the Irish to America began in 1845 after the first potato crop failed, jobs were scarce. In Boston and New York the Irish were actively discriminated against and the signs "No Irish Need Apply" began to appear in shop windows and factories. However, the Railroads were just coming into their own and with the attitude of "Manifest Destiny" westward expansion was beginning to groundswell. With the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, California in 1849, that groundswell was added even newer and greater impetus. By the early 1850's track was being laid at phenomenal speeds and the railroads found a ready and cheap labor pool among the Irish immigrants.

However the working conditions were not exactly ideal.

The construction crews worked "from sunrise to sunset, six days in the week. They spend Sunday washing and mending, gambling and smoking". At the beginning of the work day, the men would head out to the work site. Once on the grade, the workers looked forward to a twelve hour day of difficult, repetitive, backbreaking labor. The only tools available to them were two wheeled dump carts, wheelbarrows, axes, ropes, blasting powder, nitroglycerin, and mules. To relieve their thirst during the day, the Irish drank water. The water was "not always the purest and, at times, despite all precautions, a source of illness". After the day's work was finished, all the workers would troop back into camp. The Irish would eat their dinners, consisting of beef, beans, potatoes, bread, and butter.

Conditions in the work camps were often in a terrible state. Sanitation was nonexistent. Water was rarely available for washing and bathing and diseases like cholera, smallpox, dysentery and typhoid would run rampant through the camps. Workers would die with their tools literally in their hands and would be buried in unmarked graves by the trackside. Many died in work related accidents when blasting through hills and mountains to level the grade would go off wrong. Invariably the "powder monkeys", the men responsible for setting the charges, would be Irish because of the sheer danger of the job. It was almost a given that at some point one of the charges would go off early, blasting away a limb, blinding or killing the worker.

There are letters between Irish family members in existence to this day begging their family members not to go to work on the railroads as it was felt to be an almost certain death and in the 1860's, as work progressed along the track, many of the laborers abandoned their jobs and settled in the land along the tracks founding towns and building churches that stand to this day.

Yet, along that route also still stand graves in mute witness to the Irish sweat and blood poured into those tracks.

In Funk’s Grove, Illinois, in the small town’s cemetery, are two mass graves of Irish rail workers from the 1850’s.On April 28, 2000 a six foot Celtic cross was unveiled, marking two large plots in the cemetery where over 50 workers were buried in the mass graves. The graves had never been marked.

      In 1852-53, the Alton and Sangamon Railroad — today the Union Pacific/Amtrak line — was building from Springfield to Bloomington. Illinois was busy with railroad construction in the 1850’s, chiefly using immigrant Irish laborers.

     Deaths and accidents from poor working and sanitary conditions were common in these construction camps, particularly cholera. Contemporary reports note hundreds of workers dying from work camp epidemics. Although the exact circumstances of the Funk’s Grove deaths are unclear, this situation is unique because these workers were buried in a cemetery, and not in forgotten track side graves. Local oral tradition and cemetery records marked their burial, though not their individual names. The cemetery records simply note "Irish workers" over two large plots.

On the six foot Celtic cross dedicated to them is the following inscription:

This Celtic cross honors the memory of more than 50 souls buried here about 1853.
Their names are known but to God. These immigrants from Ireland were driven
from their home by famine. They lie buried here in anonymity, far from the old
homes of the heart, but forever short of the new homes of their hopes.
They arrived sick and penniless, and took hard and dangerous jobs
building the Chicago & Alton Railroad. Their sacrifices made it
possible to develop the riches of the land we enjoy today.

A fitting monument to all of the Irish who died for this cause.