For St. Patrick's Day - the Unwanted Immigrant workers we can't do without!

Sometimes coincidence steps in and reminds you of something you wouldn't have thought about or remembered. I have to interject a funny personal anecdote about my cat Lucky. When he first came to live here from West Virginia ten years ago, I had to sequester him in the back room until he got checked out so he didn't bring anything into the house and infect my other two cats - Seamus and Padraic. I would go down the steps to the back room and open the door and give him kitten milk and a little visit several times a day. He had made a nest for himself in my music bag where I had a harmonica, maracas, a small Irish bodran drum, and other little things I had picked up over the years for my daughter - a flute, and so on. It was a copious canvas bag! One day when I got down to the back door, I saw a postcard had been slipped under the door and into the hallway! It said WISH YOU WERE HERE! I am not jooking! Tht little rascal had scratched the postcard out of something else, a book off the floor to ceiling bookshelf, probably used as a book mark, and he played with it until he slipped it under the door.

Today, March 5, 2022, when I went back to the den to let the dog out, I found a photocopy of an old news article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6, 2011 on the floor. Obviously, Lucky or someone else fished it out of something, a file or a book it was tucked into. The article was about the attempt to excavate a mass grave where Irish railroad workers had been buried called DUFFY'S CUT.

In 1832, dozens (about 51) of Irish workers were buried under mysterious circumstances in a mass grave and forgotten. The East Whiteland Township site was found to be too close to the Amtrak and Septa lines to be excavated. The rsearchers had hoped to exhume the bodies and give them a proper burial.

Yesterday the history book club of which I am a member discussed the crisis in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the government was forming and the "Founding Brothers" (the name of the book) were faced with petitions from Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, about the Slavery Question. In the end, it was decided nothing could be done at the time because the whole new nation enterprise was in such a perilous and vulnerable state. The Southern States were threatening to secede if the new government did anything to abrogate their "Property" rights.

The worker class of our country from 1619 to the present has always been an abused, unappreciated, exploited class of people, generally immigrants, who do the work that those who have risen through education or other means upwards in the social economic class, are no longer willing to do - agriculture, mining, cleaning, domestic work, cooking, service jobs, and they have often been immigrants. At present and for some years the agricultural workers have struggled to find a fair balance in wages and worker protections. There was a great old protest song "All They Will Call You is Deportees" written, I think by Woody Guthrie, about how the farm workers were brought in to pick the crops then deported when they were no longer needed. Just as in the debate of the new nation, it was discussed to buy the slaves from the plantation owners and transport them back to Africa. That was finally deemed to be too expensive.

The Irish workers will lie in anonymity but we can remember them here, and an Irish Celtic Cross of limestone from Ireland has been laid as a memorial near the mass grave. One of the researchers said there are hundreds of such graves strewn across the country where Irish workers have been buried in unmarked graves. I imagine this is true for Chinese rail workers as well, and for farm workers. These Irish workers were believed to have been sick with cholera and some were murdered by vigilantes afraid they wiould carry the cholera into the community. Thrown away like polluted rubbish. One set of remains was identified, John Ruddy, a teenager from Ireland. Family members from Ireland came and took his bones home for a proper burial.

I suppose my purpose here is to remember those workers and to remind myself and others to acknowledge, affirm and be grateful to all workers who labor to keep our society going whether in the coal mines, the restaurant kitchens, the farm fields, or the home! But especially to remember all the Irish workers who came here filled with hope after the despair of the Great Hunger - the terrible unforgiveable famine in Irlend from 1845-1852 when a million people died of starvation.

I was so grateful to learn while doing family history that my own Scots-Irish ancestors, the McQuistons of Pennsylvania, were already here and hadn't had to suffer that event to get here.

Erin Go Bragh! This phrase from Eire Go Brach, originated during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 just when our own country was struggling to find its way to cohesion and survival. Jo Ann