From Ireland to America: building the canals

LIVERPOOL, Pa. (WHTM) - On the hill overlooking Liverpool sits Union Cemetery. Founded in 1808, it has over 2,000 burials and hundreds of gravestones.

Near the entrance to the cemetery is a plot of land with thirteen gravesites, but only one headstone. Of the thirteen, we have the names of only eight. The headstone marks the final resting place of John Doyle from County Down in Ireland. The area is know as the Catholic Cemetery, or the Irish Catholic Cemetery, but is most often called the Old Irish Cemetery.

Those buried in the graveyard have one thing in common. They were all interned in 1828.

That was when the canal came to Liverpool.

The Susquehanna Canal, later known as the Susquehanna Division of the Pennsylvania Canal System, stretched from the west end of the Clark's Ferry Bridge at Duncan's Island to Northumberland Borough, where the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River meet. Liverpool became a major stopping point along the canal, which began construction in 1827 and ended in 1831.

Many of those who built the canals, in Pennsylvania and across the United States, came from Ireland.

In the early 1800s life in Ireland was barely worth living. Absentee landowners in England owned most of the farmland, which they rented out to tenant farmers. Desperate to improve their lot, many Irish immigrated to America. There they faced anti-Irish prejudice as bad if not worse than they faced in the British Isles, with an unhealthy dose of anti-Catholicism thrown in for bad measure. The Irish immigrants were forced to take the most bottom-of-the-rung jobs available - like canal work.

Building a canal meant more than just digging a ditch. Trees had to be pulled up by the roots. Rock had to be blasted loose, and the boulders moved. Immense stoneworks had to be erected for canal locks. The hours were long, and the pay was bad. The lodging and food were worse. It was backbreaking, dirty, and dangerous work. At a time when there was little if any concern for worker safety, the bodies quickly piled up.

How did the thirteen men in the Irish Cemetery die? Did they succumb to work-related injuries? To sickness? Malnutrition? We do not know.

We do know the Susquehanna Canal was finished by 1831, and brought prosperity to towns along the Susquehanna River - for about 64 years. But the railroads took traffic from the canals, and still later cars took traffic from the railroads. The Susquehanna Branch was one of the first in Pennsylvania to close down; by 1901 only a few stretches of canal in the state were still in use.

Most of the Susquehanna Division Canal is now filled in. If you drive on Route 11-15 north of Duncannon, for the most part, you're driving on the old canal bed.

The Irish have done better than the canals they helped build. The 2020 census shows 38.6 Americans with Irish branches on their family trees. That's about seven and a half times the current population of Ireland.

And the Irish in the Irish Cemetery have not been forgotten. In 1990 the Irish Heritage Society of Central Pennsylvania placed a plaque at John Doyle's grave honoring those buried there:

Nicholas Madden, William Williams, Thomas Gannon, George Donoghou, Edward Nolan, John Hays, Michael Quinn, John Doyle, and the five unknowns.