New Mother Jones marker dedicated at I-55 rest area

A variety of dignitaries on Monday dedicated a new historical marker for famed union activist Mother Jones and coal-miners’ union movement at the southbound Interstate 55 Coalfield rest area south of Springfield, Illinois.

In addition, Ireland’s consul general to Chicago and the Midwest participated in a wreath-laying ceremony that day at the Mother Jones Monument, just off Route 66 in Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. Jones was a Irish native.

Actress Brigid Duffy also read a poem by Jones that recently was found.

Members of the Illinois AFL-CIO, Illinois Labor History Society, United Mine Workers of America, Irish American Heritage Center and the Illinois Route 66 Association also attended the event.

A Mother Jones display also was placed inside the Coalfield rest area building, as you can see from this photo above by Amy Rueff.

More photos from the event may be seen in Mike Matejka’s Flickr photos.

Northern Illinois University professor Rosemary Feurer was one of the prime movers for the new marker, according to a news release from the university:

“We wanted to bring the history of Mother Jones and the role of miners in Illinois and U.S. history to a wider audience,” says Feurer, who serves as director of the Mother Jones Museum and Heritage Project, which sponsored the marker.

Over the past decade, with seed money from NIU and help from university students, she also has launched a virtual museum on Mother Jones; worked with communications professor Laura Vazquez to produce a documentary film, “Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman”; opened a small bricks-and-mortar museum in Mount Olive; and has researched and is writing a biography of the labor leader.

The 2007 film was a key catalyst for the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork, Ireland, an annual event first launched in 2012, Feurer says.

“The Cork community warmed to her, partly because we have live footage of Mother Jones in the film, and they could hear the local inflection in her voice. Cork has long been called the Rebel City, and they think she owed some of her rebelliousness to her hometown in Ireland.”

Monday’s event also prompted a write-up in the Irish Examiner from Mother Jones’ home country.

“I know of nobody else from Cork who has had a sign that has been specially erected in their honour so close to one of the most famous highways in America,” said Ger O’Mahony, of Cork Mother Jones Committee.

“It shows the increasing interest in the story of Mother Jones on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in 1837 in County Cork, Ireland. A survivor of the potato famine there, she emigrated to North America but lost her husband and four children to a yellow-fever epidemic in Memphis. He also lost her dress shop to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She began working as a union activist after those tragedies.

From her Wikipedia page:

From 1897, at about 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902 she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

Mother Jones magazine, established in 1976, is named for her.

After he death at age 93, she was buried in Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive alongside the miners who died in the infamous 1898 Battle of Virden near the future Route 66 town of Virden, Illinois.

(Images of the Coalfield markers by Amy Rueff via Facebook; Image of the Mother Jones Monument in Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, by IMLS Digital Collections & Content via Flickr)

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