In early 1898, agreements had been made in four states between the United Mineworkers of America and several mining companies. They were to implement an eight hour work day and have a standard pay scale for the miners, and the company stores were to be closed ending their monopoly on where the miners and their families shopped.
However, in the fall of that year the Chicago-Virden Coal Company and other firms felt that those limitations were too stringent to adhere to and locked the miners out. They then proceeded to import strikebreakers from Alabama. This like Ludlow set the stage for violence.
On October 12, 1898, as the replacement workers and their families arrived in trains violence erupted. There were gunshots exchanged between the union and the men hired to protect the train and the strikebreakers. Before the day ended five company men were killed, and six union men had been killed - E.D. Welsh, Frank Bilyeu, Albert Smith, Joe Kitterly, Ernest Keutner, and A.H. Breneman.
In the aftermath, the strikebreakers were not allowed off the train by the train's conductor. They were later taken to and left in St. Louis without money or a way back to Alabama. The Governor ordered the National Guard to step in and prevent strikebreakers on a second train from offloading. This was the first time in U.S. History that a state's governor came to the aid of labor.
The dead union members were denied burial in established cemeteries, so the miners bought an acre of land in Mt. Olive, Illinois, where four of the men had come from. This became the Union Miners' Cemetery.
The lock out lasted six months, and labor won all of its demands. The union members were hired back under the terms of the agreement, and some supervisors were fired.
Now some of you may be asking, "Where are you going with this, Jake?"
Well, let me tell you.
A woman by the name of Mary Harris Jones or Mother Jones asked that she be buried with those workers, in the only cemetery owned solely by a labor union.
"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest, will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives of the hills of Virden, Illinois on the morning of October 12, 1898, for their heroic sacrifice of their fellow men. They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America. I hope it will be my consolation when I pass away to feel I sleep under the clay with those brave boys."
Well faithful readers, today I stood at her grave and paid respects to one of the most famous, and revered labor organizers of all time. She was just over five feet tall, and never weighed more than a hundred pounds, and lived to be 100 years old. She lost her husband and four children to yellow fever, and came to embody one of her most famous quotes:
"Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living!"

