Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter focuses on cholera’s impact in the work zones of New Jersey’s Delaware and Raritan Canal, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, and the Potomac Valley’s Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. During the summer and into the fall, Vibrio haunted these places and took unknown but significant numbers of laborers, most of whom were newly arrived Irish immigrants. In these ordinarily hazardous and disease-filled work zones, employers, with the aid of local press, covered up the full extent of cholera fatalities and explained away deaths as the consequence of intemperance. The scenes of mass mortality that occurred in 1832 have come to be recognized in more recent times through historical markers. Forensic investigations at Duffy’s Cut, a section of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, suggest some Irish workers suffered violent deaths amid the anxiety that the pandemic created.</jats:p>