POLICE IN PENNSYLVANIA are being urged to open an investigation into whether 57 Irishmen working on building a railway in Philadelphia in 1832 may have been murdered.

While it was previously thought that the 57 men – who worked on the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad and who were mostly from counties Donegal, Tyrone and Derry – had died of cholera, the discovery of what could be their bones on the site suggests some may have met a more gruesome demise.

Two skulls recovered at the mass grave in which the men are believed buried – known as ‘Duffy’s Cut‘ after Philip Duffy, the man who hired the Irish workers – showed signs that they had incurred violent trauma, with one showing a possible bullet hole. Another pair recovered previously showed signs of blunt force trauma.

William Watson, who with his twin brother Frank has been working for almost ten years in an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery of the men’s deaths, said he believed the skulls showed that the death “was much more than a cholera epidemic”.

While the Watsons believe that many of the men did die from cholera, with the disease being rampant at the time, the others may have been killed by vigilantes because of an anti-Irish prejudice or tensions between various immigrant groups.

They believed they have identified one victim as 18-year-old John Ruddy, after discovering a set of teeth with a missing upper molar, a genetic trait shared by some of his surviving Irish relatives.

They say that Duffy ordered his men to burn the bodies of the men for sanitary reasons, and to bury them underneath the railroad. Their families in Ireland were never notified of their deaths.

Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Collins, may now call for a formal investigation into the deaths, after visiting the site last summer and describing the story of the Irish emigrants as ‘an important one to tell’.