The long-dead Irish railroad workers of Duffy's Cut are again whispering from their graves.

Remains exhumed recently are expected to speak volumes about how the young immigrant laborers lived –– and mysteriously died en masse –– outside Malvern in the summer of 1832.

Diggers were startled late last year to unearth the bones of a young woman.

They were gratified this summer to finally pinpoint the common burial site thought to hold about 50 workers.

Of prime interest to Lancaster dentist Dr. Matt Patterson is a nearly full set of male teeth found  under a tree in September.

"They're the best preserved" and will be the easiest from which to extract DNA, says Patterson; he has since X-rayed them in his Manheim Township office.

Teeth are hardened genetic time capsules, adds Patterson, who began helping twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson unlock the secrets of Duffy's Cut two years ago.

These likely hold mummified dental pulp that will provide clues to the victim's parents, Patterson says.

Identifying as many of the bodies as possible is a prime goal of the Immaculata University-based Duffy's Cut Project.

Exploring how they died has been another.

The Watsons began drawing widespread media attention last year when they questioned traditional tales that all the men had succumbed to cholera a few months after sailing to America on the barque John Stamp.

The disease typically has a 50 percent mortality rate.

The brothers speculate that local militia members bent on containing the epidemic murdered some of the sickened Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad laborers who tried to leave their shanty camp in a narrow, wooded valley.

At least one man is thought to have broken away and was buried in a potter's field a few miles away, near Downingtown, Bill Watson says.

"It's crazy," adds Watson, a history professor at Immaculata. "There's this whole history of carnage along the railroad."

Tree man
Discrimination against Irish Catholic newcomers  to America was rampant at the time.

Irish laborers were considered expendable; legend has it every mile of track covered one of them.

The Watsons, who are Irish and Scottish, picked up the Duffy's Cut scent more than a decade ago while reading their grandfather's Pennsylvania Railroad files.

Suspiciously, they say, the deaths of the Irishmen hired fresh off the Philadelphia docks by contractor Philip Duffy seem to have been swept under the rug.

The twins worked for years with other volunteer Immaculata professors and students to try to find the graves.

A jaw bone, believed to be that of teenage laborer John Ruddy was discovered in 2009.

Ruddy's skull was perforated, as if pummeled by a blunt instrument.

"There are no defensive wounds on any of these bodies," Bill Watson says.

The man under the tree was also found in 2009, Bill adds, but "we couldn't get to him because the weight of the tree was too great."

A $10,000 state grant reinvigorated the project last spring, Bill says.

After most of the 80-foot-tall tulip poplar was removed this past summer, diggers beheld grisly sights.

Roots had grown through the victim's skull and shattered it, says Frank Watson, a clergyman from Howell Township, N.J.

The growing tree had broken the man's jaw in two and dismantled his coffin,  Frank says.

A pocketknife was found with the body, Bill says.

At least half the skeleton remains entwined in the roots, which, ironically, appear to have prevented most of it from washing away.

The body was aligned in the  traditional Christian way, with its head to the west and feet to the east, Frank says.

Though many of the Irishmen shared a mass grave, Frank says, the six burials the project has uncovered so far were executed with "some care," evidently by the victims' ailing fellow workers.

The Watsons theorize that the workers trying to escape were killed  and placed in rough-hewn coffins before being returned to the camp for interment.

Their coffins were tightly lidded ––   Ruddy's had 141 nails, Bill says –– apparently so that survivors would not discover their friends had been assaulted.

The tree man has not been identified.

"He looks to be about 26," according to Patterson, a Celtic heritage enthusiast who was trained in forensics at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

"He has some pretty good wear on his teeth," consistent with a man who did heavy manual labor and gritted his teeth.

Patterson says he will examine the remains further at the University of Pennsylvania with Penn anthropologist Janet Monge and former Chester County Deputy Coroner Norman Goodman.

Frank Watson says he thinks the woman might be Mary Burns, one of two women who voyaged from Ireland  aboard the John Stamp.

Burns, a 29-year-old widow, was traveling with her 70-year-old father-in-law and may have served the railroad camp as a washer woman, the Watsons say.

"Both of them disappeared" from the historical record after the journey, Bill says.

He adds that the men in the common grave probably did die of cholera.

Patterson says Enviroscan Inc. of Lancaster tracked down the elusive ossuary in recent months.

The cache of bones lies upslope from the individual graves, close by the current Amtrak corridor.

The remains are near a 1909 wall that was built to mark the deaths, Bill says.

By then, much of the valley had been filled in, stranding the skeletons 30 feet down and making their recovery uncertain.

"I think we might just have to commemorate what we've got," Bill says.

Plans include the eventual repatriation of Ruddy and the March 2012 installation in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, of an $18,000 carved Irish cross paid for by Immaculata University.

Meanwhile, the Watsons will save as much of the tree man's remains as they can in the coming weeks.

"We're transitioning to other sites," says Bill, noting that 19th-century Irish laborers also died at Downingtown and Berwyn.

"The twists and turns of the story keep coming for us," Frank says.

Contact Sunday News staff writer Jon Rutter at jrutter@lnpnews.com.