For many years, Rosemary Buffington has studied St. Michael's Cemetery, burial site of laborers of the Industrial Revolution in historic South Bethlehem of the Lehigh River Valley, in Pennsylvania. What ignited her passion was the discovery of her own immigrant ancestors buried there.
In local newspaper stories of the 1860s-1920s, she found unrelenting notices of people who died on train tracks, and discovered more than 115 of them were buried in St. Michael's .... and that was just one local cemetery. This compendium of newspaper clippings illustrates the unvarnished descriptions of people who lost their lives trespassing between two busy freight and passenger railroad lines that passed directly through Souith Bethlehem, and the response of government and Gilded-age company management.
