They Died Building the Railroad

Deaths of laborers and their family members were frequent along the Blue Ridge Railroad. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease took a heavy toll, and about thirty-three Irish men, women, and children living in shanties near the tunnel died during an 1854 cholera epidemic. Accidents also killed workers, including thirteen Irish men whose deaths in the Blue Ridge Tunnel were recorded in historical documents, though chief engineer Claudius Crozet, in letters to the Board of Public Works, never named the dead in his accounts of the incidents. The Blue Ridge Railroad also leased the labor of at least eighty enslaved men in 1854, most for $150 each, and three of them died while hauling earth from the Blue Ridge Tunnel west portal by temporary track to an embankment under construction near Waynesboro; Crozet likewise described these calamities in detail in his correspondence without identifying the victims.

Virginia · United States