By the summer of 1872, the small village of Pattenburg, NJ consisted of a mere few hundred people. Tucked quietly in the shadow of the Musconetcong Mountains, not far from the Delaware River, life there consisted mainly of farming and growing peach orchards. But the solitude of that sleepy town changed dramatically with the coming of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, making its way from the coal fields of Pennsylvania to the eastern shores of the Atlantic. By the close of the American Civil War, coal had become the commerce of the land, fueling the machinery of an ever-growing nation. And coal was making men like Coal Baron Asher Packard rich beyond their wildest dreams. 

In his quest to build his own railroad to ship his coal to market and sidestep the ever-increasing freight charges levied by the existing rail companies, Packard and his Board of Directors authorized the building of a new railroad that would stretch from the coal fields of Pennsylvania across the plains of New Jersey. Only one major obstacle stood in his way; the thousand-foot Musconetcong Mountain on the western border of New Jersey. Too high to build over it, too long to build around it, they undertook to construct what would at the time be the longest man-made tunnel of its kind in the world. Nearly a mile long through solid rock, it was heralded as the greatest construction feat of the century. 

To accomplish this momentous task, the nearly created Lehigh Valley Railroad hired John McFadden, a contractor with a reputation for accomplishing the impossible, a contractor who saw the value of using two labor sources who had a long-standing hatred for each other: newly arriving mine workers from Ireland and newly freed African American slaves of the South. Both groups were struggling to gain a foothold in a land that frankly welcomed neither. 

Despite this caustic mixture, the project proceeded without much incidence through the summer of 1872. Though ever cautious to keep the two groups of workers as well-guarded and supervised as possible, there would nonetheless come a time when, like the recently invented dynamite being used to blast a hole through the earth, a deadly explosion erupted between the two factions. 

 The Winds of Midnight is their story.  It is a story of how hatred ended in murder, of a town under siege, and a legal system that failed to protect those who sought its benefit. 

And somewhere, just outside of what is now a pleasant country village,  lay the remains of men tossed unceremoniously in an unmarked grave, forgotten in time save the telling of their story.