In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, UNMC Today is highlighting the life and times of Irish Americans. The four-part series continues today with a look at how the Irish helped build America’s transportation system.
Digging ditches: Building the railroads and canals
The treble strike of the pickax and the bass rumble of rock, soil, and earth being blasted out and hauled away to create canals or to lay railroad track are evoked by many Irish-American folk songs written throughout the 1800s. The sounds, sights, sweat and toil of construction projects like the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad filled the long days for millions of Irish migrant workers, who built the infrastructure the United States needed to become a highly profitable industrial power.
The creation of America’s tremendous transportation system came at the cost of many lives. The manual labor took men through unsettled and — when building canals — often swampy frontier land, where they were likely to meet violent deaths or to become victims of typhus, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever, or cholera.
As tough as farming work in their homeland had been, at least it was on cleared land and was seasonal. Now the young men from rural Ireland had to adapt to a grueling, year-round, dawn-to-dusk work schedule.
The Irish newcomers in the 1800s had little choice but to build canals and railroads and be paid less than $1 a day. The labor required for these projects was enormous and the poor, unskilled Irish had little else but their brute strength to offer.
With their bare hands, the Irish dug portage paths, aqueducts, sluices, dams, reservoirs, dikes, tunnels, slips and docks for 4,000 miles of canal between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. Many of these immigrants never left the work site alive. The average life expectancy for a canal worker – whether he labored on the Virginia, Chesapeake, Delaware, New York, Missouri, Arkansas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan canals – was fewer than seven years.
Taken from “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” by Mick Moloney.