The Blue Ridge Tunnel by Mary E. Lyons

Author:Mary E. Lyons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

So when cholera struck Blue Ridge tunnel workers in 1854, the editors’ perspective toward the Irish was well in place. Recycling a Vindicator announcement, the August 9 issue of the Spectator ran a column entitled “Cholera at the Tunnel.” It reported that fourteen cases of cholera were “confined to the six or eight shantees situated on the ravine running from near the top of the mountain at Rockfish to the Eastern mouth of the Tunnel—a distance of sixty to a hundred yards—and is hence attributed to some local cause.”

The text gave readers a geographical reason to believe they were safe: Tennessee, Richmond, Scottsville, Rockfish Gap. According to the paper, only “away” people could die of cholera. Race or foreign birth also seemed to shield readers. Cholera victims in Virginia were “colored persons” or Irish living in “shantees.”

Virginians were not alone in their bigotry toward what they thought of as the lower class. As millions of immigrant laborers arrived in the 1850s, American newspapers dosed readers with editorials, cartoons and articles that were contemptuous of the newcomers, especially the Irish. Irish laborers, in the main, constructed the roads, canals, bridges and railroads that became the arteries of nineteenth-century American commerce. But as scholar Kevin Kenny notes in Making the Irish American, “The American Irish in the period 1845 to 1870 were clearly the least successful and the most exploited of all European Americans.”

Cholera decimated entire families on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Tunnel. The Irish workers often frustrated Claudius Crozet, chief engineer for the project. Earlier, in 1853, he had complained that the men took two days off for a funeral when someone died, even a “mere child.” Still, Crozet was the only person to honor the dead Irish by naming them publicly. In a July 31 letter to the editor of the Jeffersonian Republican newspaper in nearby Charlottesville, he listed a few of the victims. Their burial places are still unknown:

Daniel Harrington, a sober and valuable man, aged about 45. Old Downey, probably 70 years old; Cain Holland 20; Dan’l Sullivan 22. Jeremiah Harrington’s wife, her child and her mother. The wife of old Downey had recovered, but relapsed on Saturday and died on that day. Yesterday young Downey attended the funeral of his father, and on his way back was taken sick and was himself buried to-day. Another Harrington also died in a few hours—in all 11 in about a week. The men of the east side have generally scattered and fled, otherwise the disease would take more victims of course.

Crozet later noted that hired slaves working in the tunnel area weren’t susceptible to cholera. It was a silly conclusion. Obviously many African Americans were dying of the disease in Richmond. Blue Ridge Tunnel payroll records show that the slaves and the overseer escaped illness because they stopped work and probably left the area between August 1 and August 14.

By the time the Spectator and Vindicator editors reprinted Crozet’s July 31 letter, cholera had traveled to shanties farther east toward the Blue Ridge Tunnel.

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