Shanties on the Mountainside: A Look at Labor on the Blue Ridge Railroad

Summary

From 1850 to 1860, the Blue Ridge Mountains were home to roughly 1,900 Irish laborers as they worked on the construction of the Virginia Central Railroad. Upon its completion, the railroad stretched from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Ohio River. Along the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Irish immigrants constructed several cuts and tunnels, including the Blue Ridge Tunnel. At its completion, the tunnel measured 4,263ft long and bridged two Virginia counties. This project proved to be an especially daunting task that took ten years to complete and cost many lives. Workers and their families nearby were forced to live in groups of shanty homes, prone to regular outbreaks of disease throughout construction. In 2011, a local non-profit organization, focused on pinpointing the remains of these Irish shanty homes, contacted the University of Maryland to see if an archaeological survey could aid their search. Over the course of two years, archaeological research shed light on the material culture of transient labor and reinforced strong community ties related to the surrounding cultural landscape. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the archaeological evidence collected and determine if the data conclusively points to the existence of shanty settlements at the two sites investigated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21927