Wikimedia Commons/William E. Barrett
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Irish Laborers Who Built New England’s Catholic Foundation
The Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park preserves the story of when desperate Rhode Islanders discovered that digging ditches was harder than they thought. In 1824, the Blackstone Canal project was failing badly.
Local workers couldn’t handle the brutal construction, so bosses recruited over 1,000 Irish immigrants who knew canals from England and New York’s Erie Canal…