Category Archives: Illinois

Mount Olive, Illinois is about fifty miles south of Springfield. It is where you will find the Union Mine Cemetery. There you will see a large stone monument flanked by the statues of miners holding a pickaxe and a sledgehammer. The monument is for Mary G. Harris Jones also known as “Mother Jones.”

Mary was born sometime in the 1830s in Ireland. Her exact birth date has been lost to history. Because of the Great Potato Famine she emigrated to Canada when she was a teenager and studied to become a teacher. In 1861 she moved to Memphis, Tennessee and married George E. Jones, a member and organizer of the National Union of Iron Moulders. Six years later, her husband and their four children all died of yellow fever.

Distraught from the death of her family she moved to Chicago and opened a dressmaking shop. A few years later the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed her shop and home. It was during the rebuilding of Chicago that Mary Jones became active in the labor movement and helped in organizing strikes for fair wages. She believed a man should make enough money that his wife could stay home and raise their children. I know that statement is sexist in today’s standards, but it was a big leap back forward back then.

She became a member of the United Mine Workers and helped organize strikes across the nation. She was arrested several times and in one court case in West Virginia an attorney representing a mining company claimed she was “the most dangerous woman in America”. At the age of 60 she took on the persona of Mother Jones and fought for the rights of poor working Americans. In 1903, Jones organized children who were working in mills and mines to participate in her famous “March of the Mill Children ” where they marched from Pennsylvania to President Theodore Roosevelt’s summer home on Long Island.

Mother Jones was a prolific and influential speaker and worked with the unions into her 90s. She died on November 30, 1930 at her friend’s home in Silver Springs, Maryland. She was laid to rest in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive near the miners who died in the 1898 Battle of Virden, a riot that occurred as part of a union strike.

Thank you for Subscribing to Lost In The States, If you have not subscribed yet, It would mean a lot to me if you did.

The small town of White Hall stands southwest of Springfield in rural Illinois. It is there you will find Whiteside Park and a stone monument. Carved out of the top is a woman with her arms around a young boy and girl. At first glance you might think it was a carving of a mother and her children but looking more closely the boy is holding a school book. It is a memorial to a teacher who gave her life while protecting her students.

On April 19, 1927 a storm was racing across the Illinois countryside. Annie Louise Keller was the school teacher at Centerville School in White Hall, when she saw the approaching storm. Keller ordered her sixteen pupils under their desks while she stood near the wall at the front door. A tornado ripped through the area and destroyed the school. Townsfolk rushed to the pile of boards and timber that once made up the schoolhouse. Miraculously they found all of the children alive protected by their school desks. Tragically, they found the body of Annie Louise Keller under the wall she was standing next to. She gave her life protecting the students she taught and loved.

Schoolchildren from around Illinois raised four thousand dollars and the state pitched in five thousand for a memorial to the heroic teacher. The monument that stands in White Hall was erected in her honor two years after the horrific tornado.

Thank you for Subscribing to Lost In The States, If you have not subscribed yet, It would mean a lot to me if you did.