A call to remember 8,000 Irish who died while building the New Orleans Canal Irish were preferred to slave labor as they were less valuable Mary Helen Lagasse is an award winning author based in New Orleans. She is currently researching her latest book on the Irish who died while building the New Basin Canal. By the time the canal opened in 1838, 8,000 Irish laborers had succumbed to cholera and yellow fever. She is appealing for anyone with information about their ancestors who may have been involved in the construction to get in touch with her. She can be reached at [email protected]. In 1832, in the Second Municipality, sometimes called the American Sector, an area upriver from Canal St., the arduous task of digging the New Orleans Navigation Canal, later known as the New Basin Canal, began. “Paddies” slipped into the swamp to dig with pick and shovel the mosquito-infested ditch that would be the new 60-ft. wide 6.07 mile long shipping canal. There was no dynamite, nothing but wheel-barrows with which they’d haul the sludge out of the ditch on inclined planks. And there was no way for them to drain the relentless seepage but with pumps invented by Archimedes in 287 B.C. The builders of the citys New Basin Canal expressed a preference for Irish over slave labor for the reason that a dead Irishman could be replaced in minutes at no cost, while a dead slave resulted in the loss of more than one thousand dollars. Laboring in hip-deep water, the Irish immigrant diggers, who had little resistance to yellow fever, malaria, and cholera, died in inestimable numbers. Six years after construction began, when the canal opened for traffic in 1838, hundreds if not thousands of Irish laborers would never see their homes again. It was the worst single disaster to befall the Irish in their entire history in New Orleans. This is the preface and focal point of my work-in-progress, working title Bridget Fury, a novel based on the building of New Basin Canal and of the tragic consequences for the Irish immigrant laborers, many of who died from disease and exhaustion and were buried in shallow graves alongside the fetid ditch. ~ MARY HELEN LAGASSE, IrishCentral
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 15:19:09 +0000
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