BUZZ MAGAZINE - The Union Miners Cemetery, Mt. Olive the burial place of the great labor agitator and champion of mining families, Mary Harris Jones, is the site of a celebration in remembrance of a seminal victory of the United Mine Workers of America coal miners at Virden, Illinois on October 12, 1898. The coal company locked the union miners out of the mine and brought in a trainload of hungry men, most were Black men, all desperate for work to feed their families. Armed detectives accompanied the would-be miners on the train. As the train approached the Virden mine a gun battle began. Miners and guards died. The Union miners prevailed and went back to work. Illinois quickly became the most well-organized union mining state in the country, and the United Mine Workers went on the organized effectively in other mining states. Today the UMWA represents union miners across the country.
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Four miners from Mt. Olive were killed in the battle, but the City of Mt. Olive and the local business and church leaders refused to allow their burial in local cemeteries. In 1899 the union bought an acre of land and established the Union Miners Cemetery, the first and only union-owned cemetery in the country. The miners were buried there and the cemetery became the burial place for miners, their families, labor organizers, and activists from Illinois and around the country.
Mother Jones’ work took her around the country. An immigrant from Ireland, she lost her husband and children in the yellow fever epidemic in 1867 and her dress-making business in the great Chicago Fire, she devoted the rest of her long life to making working conditions better for laborers. She spoke for child laborers in the textile mills, immigrant women in the dress factories, and miners in the coal and copper mines. Oral histories and newspapers document Mother Jones's visits to Mt. Olive, Staunton, and other towns in Macoupin County to support labor groups. She attended several Miners Day celebrations across the years. Mt. Olive-born labor leader, Adolph Germer, met with Mother Jones in the early 1920s on one of her visits and discussed the possibility of her burial at the Union Miners Cemetery. In 1923 she wrote to the local Miners Union and asked that she be buried with the miners who died at Virden, miners she called her brave boys. When she died in 1930, at the age of 93, she was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery. An estimated 40 thousand people came to her funeral. In 1936 the Progressive Miners of America built the monument that stands in the cemetery today. In the late 1990s, the Union Miners Cemetery Association took over the administration of the cemetery. Miners Day celebrates the victory at Virden, the life of Mother Jones, the miners, and their families, and the contemporary activists buried there. The Union Miners Cemetery celebration of Miners Day will take place at noon on October 9, 2022, with remembrances of the families who fought for fair wages and justice in the workplace with songs, rousing speeches, and reflection on the history of Miners Day. The event is free and open to the public.
This story originally ran in the October issue of The Prairie Land Buzz Magazine http://www.thebuzzmonthly.com.
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