Irish railroad workers buried in Loose Creek cemetery during 1850s cholera wave
This article was originally published in the Nov. 21, 2014, print edition of The Catholic Missourian:
“Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anma.” (Gaelic for “May their souls be at the right hand of God.”)
The earth rests easy over spiritual heirs of St. Patrick and St. Boniface in an old cemetery behind Immaculate Conception School in Loose Creek.
One hundred twelve Irish railroad workers who succumbed to cholera in 1853-55 await the Resurrection in the company of many of the town’s earliest settlers, mostly immigrants from the Rhine River Valley in what is now Germany.
Cholera is an intestinal infection that claimed many thousands of lives, mostly poor immigrants, in rural and urban parts of the United States from the 1840s into the 1860s.
Spread by contaminated water and food and a general lack of proper sanitation, cholera was among the most devastating public health crises in Missouri’s history.
Construction crews, mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland, labored under harsh conditions to build the Missouri Pacific Railroad.
Working through Osage County, they camped near Dauphene, now known as Bonnots Mill, which was a shipping hub near where the Osage River spills into the wide Missouri.
The area was part of the Immaculate Conception parish in Loose Creek at that time.
“During the early 1850s the settlement was visited by various diseases, chief among them the cholera,” historian Father John Rothensteiner wrote in 1928.
Jesuit Father Jacob G. Buschotts, the parish’s first resident pastor, and Jesuit priests from Westphalia ministered to the railroad workers and saw to it that those who died had a place to be buried.
The rites and the burials were often conducted by lantern light.
“I heard stories from a lot of the old-timers from Loose Creek that because everyone was scared to be around it, they would come at night with a wagonload of bodies, up to a dozen, and put them in a mass grave, and they would be out of sight by morning,” stated lifelong Loose Creek parishioner Hubert Backes, who serves on the Immaculate Conception Cemetery Committee.
Fr. Rothensteiner wrote that laborers whom the Jesuit priests had befriended and ministered to during the cholera epidemic “expressed their gratitude by donating to the church the two side altars of our Blessed Lady and St. Joseph.”
The side altars might have been moved to the current church when it was built in 1868-70, although their whereabouts are currently unknown.
The railroad workers’ burial place in the cemetery remained unmarked for over 130 years until parishioners John and Melba Boessen, both now deceased, pledged to help pay for a stone marker.
“It was one of those projects Dad needed to get done before he died,” recalled their son, John “J.P.” Boessen Jr., who’s also a Loose Creek parishioner.
Looking through some of his father’s papers, the younger Mr. Boessen found a list of all names and ages of the railroad workers who are buried in the cemetery, some conceptual drawings of the marker, and a copy of his father’s handwritten letter, asking for donations.
“At the bottom, he just said, ‘We have all these Irish buried in our cemetery. There’s no monument of any sort, so I’m asking for your help,’” J.P. Boessen stated.
Parishioners and friends were generous, so the marker was ordered and installed in 1988.
Adorned with two simple shamrock emblems, it reads: “In memory of 112 Irish workers who died 1853 to 1855 in the cholera epidemic while building the Missouri Pacific Railroad thru Osage County and are buried in this plot of Immaculate Conception Cemetery. Rest in peace.”
Father Richard Cronin, a priest from Ireland who was pastor at that time, blessed the marker.
He closed with the words of a centuries-old Irish blessing: “May the good earth be soft under you when you rest upon it, and may it rest easy over you when, at last, you lay out under it, and may it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be out from under it quickly, and up, and off, and on its way to God!”
