(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Illinois Stories, is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music) - Hello, welcome to Illinois Stories, I'm Mark McDonald in Taylorville on the square where over the years a multitude of interesting things have happened.

But, in the mid thirties this was the focal point of what was known as the Christian County Coal Mine Wars.

And a local man, a Springfield man, who's spent several years, actually decades doing interviews and writing about the Coal Mine Wars and Kevin Corley is with us today on the square.

We're standing here in a drizzle, in a January drizzle, Kevin, but it kind of reminds us that it's unpleasant as it is here, it was much more unpleasant here in the 30s, wasn't it?

- We wouldn't have been standing like this in the '30s, Mark, because up on top of the buildings around the square here, the National Guard was here, because of all the disturbances, which we'll talk about later.

And supposedly, there were machine guns there, and National Guardsmen with bayonets and if we'd been standing here talking like this we might've got poked with a bayonet.

- Is that right?

- Yes.

- And what was all the disagreement about?

- The United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis was the Christian county coal miners thought that he had betrayed them.

And gone over to help the mine comPanaies with some of the decisions they were making.

So, they decided to form a new union called the Progressive Mine Workers of America.

And at one time they had so many of the progressives that were arrested, they had to put them back here in this courthouse, and there were hundreds of them there and one day they decided, let's get out of here.

They tore the heck out of the courthouse, jumped out the windows and ran away, hoping the National Guard wouldn't shoot them.

- So the National Guard here, was here to protect the United Mine Workers cause is that sort of the way it was?

- Well, if you asked the progressives they would have said, yes, that the National Guard was really hurting them more than it was the United Mine Workers and the coal comPanaies.

- But if you stood here on the square in between 1932 and up to the mid-30s, what would you have seen?

- Well, if you're standing here and at the wrong time you might've seen the Progressive or the Breeze Courier newspaper office get blown up.

That, and the United Mine Workers office got blown up the same time.

Some people say the Progressives did it, the Progressive say no, the United Mine Workers and the Coal company did it themselves to get sympathy.

- Yeah, but you'd see the the National Guard here on a regular basis?

- Yes, they'd be right around this area, you'd have two of them at every one of the entrances to the courthouse.

- And on the roof, some people with machine guns.

- Right and that they were camped right next block over, they had tents and everything set up and yeah, they were here for quite a while.

- It was a very rough and turbulent time.

I mean, it was during the depression too so, nobody was doing very well.

Everybody was scrambling for every penny they could get.

And that's really kind of what your books are about.

We're gonna look at your books as we go through this program.

And fortunately for us here on the square, is the Christian County Coal Mine Museum, which also has an interesting story, and has some displays that we can look at as we hear about your books.

- Well, great, I'm looking forward to it, Mark.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

- Okay, so let's pick up this ongoing story, inside the Christian County Coal Mine Museum, Kevin.

Because in here, is where a lot of the photographic evidence we have of the interviews, that you started doing in the '80s with the people that were actually involved in these coal wars.

We've got a lot of evidence in here, about what coal mining was like back in those days, don't we?

- Oh, yeah.

- It's an interesting room to be in.

- Oh, it's fantastic, and the Christian County is lucky to have this Coal Mine Museum.

Because a lot of the information that I was able to receive from the people that I interviewed, they left their their memorabilia in here, which makes it very interesting.

The two, the four boys on the front of my book.

- Let me hold these for you.

- Sixteen Tons, covers 1898 to 1933, and the sequel is, Throw Out The Water which is from 1933 to 1937.

Same characters carry over.

But these four boys, I interviewed in there, when they were written in their 80s, this picture was taken from 1913, is the Ball brothers from Ewingville, which South of Taylorville which is South of Taylorville.

And they were also photographers from 1898 till they died and a lot of the photographs you'll see in this museum came from their basement.

We were able to get a lot of their photographs put into Abraham Lincoln presidential library and museum.

- Is that right?

So you do these, you do these interviews starting in the 1980s and, and you are working with Carl Oblinger, who's a historian and he, I remember when he published a book about the coal wars and I thought to myself, that's a period in Illinois history, that is not particularly well known by, the general public.

So, this is, what you're trying to do is say, this is a very important part of our history, and your novels show that, don't they?

- Very, and the reason I wrote it in novel form, and Carl used to tease me a little bit about it and a guy named Colin Davis, who's a friend of mine, he's the one that got me to do oral history interviews, they would tease me that I was doing a novel, instead of an academic work.

And I said, well, what's the greatest book you can find on the civil war and what are a academic book, well they could name it, but they could name The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane.

So I wanted to get through to my students, the young people in America, the sacrifices that working men and women have made so we have better wages and working conditions today.

And this is the way that will, I think, interest them.

- We started out in your scenario, we started out even before the year 1900, don't we?

- Right.

- And its just remarkable, when you look at what coal mining was like in the day, you should take us through this, just a little bit.

- Sure, in 1897 and 1898, actually 1897, there was a big strike where the United Mine Workers were just becoming powerful.

And in 1890, the next year, 1898 they had major problems in Pana when the coal comPanaies in Pana, Virden, and Carterville, Illinois, refused to pay the miners what they had promised, which was 40 cents a ton.

Well, the miners rebelled of course, they went on strike, United Mine Workers were not very big at that time, but they brought black strikebreakers in, from Birmingham, Alabama and to Pana to work the mines.

And the reason the mines were so important in Pana, was we had a bit longer seams.

Our seams were six to eight feet high, and 24 inches thick.

And it was great bituminous coal.

And it was very popular among the railroads.

So, this picture show the miners working down, this one over here is, they're cutting the seam.

And it... - Well, you can see that they're able to stand all the way up in this seam.

- Yes - So that's what you're seeing is 68 feet.

So they can't even swing an axe, over their head.

- But of course, they had to bring, use coal mules to bring the coal out because the coal was so heavy, sometimes they'd have to pull it out by, with people.

- Now, I notice there are no pictures of blacks working in the mines that probably wasn't allowed, was it?

They probably didn't know what was going on.

- And actually, that's the problem we have with understanding this time period.

The blacks were not allowed, we have practically no record, from the blacks.

We have plenty of oral histories and letters and things that were in the newspaper about white experience, nothing about the black experience.

So, you have to kind of speculate on what they were going through.

I wanna mention that the first blacks brought to Pana, had no clue that they were gonna be strikebreakers.

In fact, they were told... - They would be offered jobs, and then they left them in the dark.

- They were actually told that there was no problem in Pana.

And they did the same in Virden, in Carterville.

So they came in without a clue.

And what happened was a lot of the trains were stopped where they, they were bringing the the blacks in and they shot them.

They had gunfights which is what we'll talk about with the Virden.

- Let's let's walk over that way.

- Okay.

- Follow you.

We are in very close quarters here so that's why we're being so sort of short.

- This display is the Virden, this is a monument that they have in the town of Virden not on the square.

and what it shows is that here's the letter, here's the sign they had for the 175 good colored miners.

Doesn't say, it tells them what they'll get paid, which is up to like 370 an hour.

- 30 cents a ton, instead of 40 cents a ton, that they had promised to pay the whites.

- And actually when they got there, they only paid 25 cents a ton.

- Oh, boy.

- And then to make it even worse, which was common with all the minors they had, they paid them in scrip or coupons, which was only good at the company store.

So once the miners got caught up, in this cycle of owing money to the company store, they never could get away.

They were caught up in it.

And the other thing they didn't tell them was, they also charged them to bring their wives and children.

They didn't tell them that when they came but once they got here, they looked at their first checks and it was practically, nothing.

- Yeah, oh boy.

And Mother Jones, she's an interesting character too.

Does she appear in any of your books?

- Oh, yes she's in both books.

She's very important, of course, she lived to be almost 100 years old, died in about 1930 and she was in Central Illinois, a lot helping the coal miners.

She was in West Virginia, and Ludlow, Colorado for that massacre.

But, she is actually buried in Virden, down in Mount Olive, - In Mount Olive, yeah.

- Yes, and with her, she wanted to be buried with her boys who died in the Virden massacre.

And we just mention what happened there was the train came in with, to bring the black strikebreakers in.

They didn't know it, but at the last minute they were told to duck down in their seats as they came into Virden.

And there were detectives on the train, that had brand new Winchesters.

And there were detectives up in the stockade that they were bringing them into, in the coal mine with winchesters.

The United Mine Workers tried to not have guns and things.

They were told they weren't to bring them but a few of them did.

And so, when the train came in and it wouldn't stop, a gunfight erupted and seven United Mine Workers were killed, five of the company guards were killed and it was quite an event.

And then a lot of the blacks that were on the train were wounded, when they got to Springfield, Illinois, they were left, they were told that they could either go home to Birmingham, and the United Mine Workers would pay for it, or they would have to stay on the train.

They kept them there for three days, at the end of the three days, the company gave up and said, we don't want you anymore going home.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And some of those guys went to Pana to mine some of the blacks.

- Now let's go back this way again, I guess the United Mine Workers, I'm guessing at that time was a very new union, Wasn't, it?

- Right.

- And this event we just talked about in Pana and Virden, helped to get the United Mine Workers powerful.

Without those things, that were the first major successes, that they had across the whole nation.

- This is, we talked about that, with a six, a six to eight foot seam that we were looking at, but they had to work in really uncomfortable and almost inhumane conditions.

- Oh, yes, yeah.

- Take us through what, this is a day in a mine, isn't it?

- Sure it is.

This is around the turn of the century.

This picture shows the outside of the mine this is the old coal shaft in Taylorville, though it was closed in the early 1900s but its the first one, they started in, here's one of the miners getting his pit tag, which was very important because if he died down there and they couldn't identify the body, they could see the pit tags, and see his pit tag number.

Here they are getting on the cage, going down into the darkness.

When they got down there, one of the first things they needed to do was check the top.

This is very important, it's called, sounding the top.

You can see this fellow putting his hand up on the top of the roof and he pokes it.

If he hears a hollow sound, he puts another prop in.

- Oh, my goodness.

He can get out of there, but he just puts in another prop.

- Yeah, here's the guy that's cutting, yeah he's cutting the props.

This was oak that they used down in our mines.

Putting the prop at the top.

And then up here, we've got the, you can see that our seams are fairly high.

These ones, you can see the coal seams is about six foot high.

We even have taller ones than that.

Here they are pulling some of the loose things down from the top.

So it wouldn't fall on people.

This guy over here, here's the, it shows you a better picture of the height, of the seams.

- What's he doing?

- He's just putting his hand up to show you how high it is.

And the next picture, this guy is checking for methane gas.

He puts it up there.

- He's got a meter, okay.

Now in some of these conditions, we've got to look at some of these, because we mentioned, okay that's a high seam, but look down here at some of these, this is barely getting a train through.

- Yeah, we had a few mines in Illinois that had had lower tops, but a lot of these pictures at the bottom are from West Virginia and Kentucky.

And that's why I wanted to state, was, the reason that coal mining was successful in Illinois and the United Mine Workers were successful was because we had better seams of coal, we had safer conditions, and the good thing is when a miner was out on strike, he could survive very easily, but with livestock, and gardening and hunting and fishing and gathering.

So, and he could go to local towns to work.

But you can see the conditions down here, in these little mines here.

Here's a.

- Yeah.

- Let's just start with right up here.

Here's a guy cutting the seam in a three foot mine.

You're not gonna get a whole lot of coal out of that.

- No, and look how uncomfortable that would be.

You'd be crouched all day on your hands and knees.

- Right, and then they had to drill with a six foot drill into the face.

And then with the hole that was in there, they would tamp a piece of wax or a paper, they put the dynamite or the black powder in, this guy, is a crazy picture 'cause he's actually biting the cap, the mine cap, which is a silly thing to do.

He could have blown his head off - Oh, man.

- But, and then they shot it.

And the smart thing in Illinois was, the miners who would shoot at night and let the dust settle and then load it, had less chance of having what they call back then, miner's asthma.

But here they are loading the coal.

This is one of the Ball's pictures here that were taken right over by Ewingville.

- Oh, that's the family you were describing that... - Yeah they took that photograph.

Here, they are, sometimes they pushed the coal.

These are men pushing it.

Sometimes we used mules around here, but down in the three-foot mines, they used dogs and even goats.

- To pull up the wagons.

Oh my goodness.

- And the joke was down in the mine, in the three-foot mines, is, you know what, if we get stuck down here, at least we'll have something good to eat, that's all.

- Goodness, gracious.

We mentioned earlier, you talked about on the square in Taylorville, about what it was like when they called in the National Guard.

And about that time, we've got a display of pictures over here too, that show what was going on at about that same time.

And I love this one to start with because this shows you that this is at the state Capitol in Springfield.

- Yes.

- The amount of fervor, and I guess, participation that this whole these wars brought along with them.

- Yes, a wonderful lady named Agnes Wieck, organized a 10,000 women march on the Capitol building, in late January of 1933.

And here's some of the women who were, she had them all dressed in white, except for the wives, the widows of the Moweaqua disaster, that had happened just right over here in Moweaqua, Illnois at Christmas Eve just the month before, And they dressed in black but yes they marched, they talked to Henry Horner who was the governor at the time and tried to demand that the, what happened was the progressive, there was a, the United Mine Workers were being criticized, because John L. Lewis was going along with the company and thinking, yes, we need to mechanize.

We're gonna have to cut back on miners.

Well, the miners didn't wanna see staff cut back.

They'd rather share jobs.

So, there was even talk about socialism things back in those days then.

But here's a picture they formed a new union called the Progressive Miners of America and they literally went to war with the United Mine Workers and the coal companies to the point where the National Guard had to be brought in to keep the peace.

- That was a brutal time, wasn't it?

And actually down here as a likeness of John L. Lewis, on the time, cover of Time Magazine.

He was from Springfield too, wasn't he?

- Yes, yes, he lived in Springfield on a, his house is still there on Lawrence - Brutal times.

And do any of your books reflect this time period?

- Oh, yes the whole thing.

Sixteen Tons, begins in 1898 with Pana massacre that occurred, an alleged incident where a bunch of blacks were killed, and they buried their bodies.

And then continues on, most of the words in my books came right from the people I interviewed, which I think makes it unique.

So, when you read about a person saying something, they really did.

And then, Throw Out The Water is a sequel, that picks up in 1933 and it covers just the Christian County coal mine wars.

- So, and these books are available here at the Christian County coal miners museum as well as, a really interesting tour, if you wanna look around this place, - Oh yes.

- Because you've got all kinds, you've got the old uniforms of some of the family members that worked in the mines.

You've got the stories and the photos from the coal wars and a lot of coal miners, particularly, or people who were, who came from coal mine families will find these particularly interesting.

- That's what was interesting when I talked to my high school students, they'd say, these gunfights couldn't have happened in Taylorville.

We would have, there'd be a book about it, there'd be a movie.

(mark laughing) And that's why I wrote the book.

And then, they wound up getting published quite accidentally and I'm happy for that and young people are learning a lot of the things about their families and they, they actually did a lot of the interviews.

- Well, thank you.

- Okay, well, thank you.

- Charles E. Martin, your father Bernard and we're looking at his uniform now, was a coal miner throughout his life.

Your grandfather, was associated in a very unfortunate way, with the coal mines.

And, those two sort of are responsible for you wanting to be part of this, this coal miner's museum, isn't it?

- Yes, that's correct, Mark.

It's in the family.

My grandfather was the United Mine Workers union official and unfortunately he was killed in 1950.

He was shot in the face, a 100 feet away with a scope rifle.

The family believes it was intentional killing.

My dad and my mother were on their honeymoon at the time and they came back and his dad's shot and killed.

- We have a picture of your grandpa right here.

- Yeah, 1950, August 4th.

I never knew him, I'm named after him, I would have liked to have known him.

- And your dad, then of course was, well of course that made him bitter.

He was bitter about that his whole life.

But then he also spent whole life in coal mines.

- He followed in his father's footsteps, and my grandfather was a district board member, in the United Mine Workers and Du Quoin, Illinois.

And my dad ultimately, became a local union president at the Hillsborough mine in Catherine and then became district board member here in Taylorville as well, and became very active in the cause of safe working conditions.

After he finished his time with the United Mine Workers, he became a state mine inspector for the 25 years, he was a state mine inspector.

And that's the uniform that he wore as a state mine inspector and he was proud to try to make coal mining safer for everyone.

- You sort of, I don't know wanna say, I'm not sure, you became interested in this, Will Stone kept this thing going for years.

- Will is the founder.

- He was a coal miner himself.

- Yes.

- He had a, it was a dedicated interest in this particularly Christian County Coal Mines.

- Yes, peabody number 10.

- He brought this collection together from mostly local folks.

- Lots of people donated, lots of people helped him but Will was this, he spearheaded the effort.

- And then William passed away unfortunately and now you are carrying, this on, this collection on, and it's, it's interesting 'cause you don't even live here, you live up in Byron so you can only be here once a week, right?

- I'm here once a week, this is my home and we're trying to sell our home in Byron and come here but I promised Will, that I would make sure I do everything I could to keep the museum going.

- I asked you to pull out some of the more interesting, some of the interesting things that are in the collection here.

And I like this, let me hold this up, because, this shows where the coal in Illinois is.

And boy, if you talk about Southern Illinois, it's chocked full of coals.

- Sure, it is.

- The purple is where it's most dense.

- Right.

- And then as you get to the lighter colors, it's less dense, but it's everywhere, South I-80 isn't it?

- Right, it could be a booming economic engine for the state.

Unfortunately, right now there's only 10 active coal mines, and they're all in the Southern part of the state.

But at one time, coal was king.

And we could become more involved in the coal industry if we choose to, 'cause the resources are there.

- Yeah, and look at this, I love this because this is a picture of a guy.

Now this John Cerrikan, I'm not sure how his name's pronounced, is from Virden, Illinois.

And you can tell, this is from the '30s.

He builds a car that runs on coal.

- Yeah.

- Now who ever thought that, that's progressive as you can get.

- It certainly is.

It claims that it got 58 miles an hour and could go 35 miles on a bucket of coal.

- 35 miles on a bucket of coal.

- Pretty inventive.

- No kidding, good for him, wow.

- One of our area miners.

- You know, Kevin talked about the script, what you got paid when you worked in the mines and this was valuable only in the company store.

- Right, that's a commitment to coal.

- Commitment to coal.

- Yes they did, on their 100th anniversary in 1983, Peabody Coal issued replica copies of scrip that was used in place of money.

- Fantastic.

And you know, we were talking about, Kevin said, one of the first things a miner, did when he got into a room down in the mine, was they would poke I guess they did it this way, didn't they?

You hold it 'cause you know how.

- Well the brass top, especially if you had brass that made a better hollow sound.

So it was a safety feature to test the top, to make sure that where you would be working, wouldn't fall on you during the course of the day.

And often times the bars had a little pry bar, of some sort, that might be a fix to it to help pull down the bad top.

Not every coal miner had one of these.

In fact, oftentimes it was just the mine examiners, or the supervisor of the section, or the state inspectors or the bosses.

- Yeah, yeah.

- That sort of thing.

- But this is a very valuable tools, very simple, but saved a lot of lives.

- Yeah, yeah.

To talk about saving lives, this is a dangerous piece of piece of equipment right here, Isn't it?

- Right, this is fragile.

- Would you think this is a 1900s version of the open flame cap?

Fuel would go into this receptacle, flame would come out here, that was the only light.

- And you just kept it going while you down there?

- Yes, as long you had a flashlight.

- This what you had.

- Right and that's the light by which you work this is a canvas top, so it provided no protection except that it held the, your fuel for light.

- So here's possibly hundreds of guys down here, in this place where all these coal dust and gases is.

And they've got open flames.

Everyone's got an open flame.

- Right.

- Wow.

- It's hard to imagine working conditions were so primitive.

- Oh, my goodness.

- This is a safety light, a modern version of the way to detect methane gas.

These were very common but very easy to operate.

And they would hold them up at the top of the face, where methane gas would accumulate.

And if there was a flame in here, and if the flame became more intense, that measured the presence of methane gas.

And then they would vacate that section.

- Time for one more item, okay?

And this, I wanna show this because this ties back to Kevin's book, Throw Out The Water.

- Right, this is a pretty much standard issue.

Everybody in the coal mine that I know of, had a dinner bucket and the dinner bucket, would have a top part where you put your food.

And of course the bottom part, is where you had your water which was much more important than food.

Because, you can survive underground without food for a long time, but, you sure can't survive very long without water.

And what people would do, the union people who would become upset with whatever, if they wanted to engage in a wildcat strike, which unfortunately had happened probably more often than it should have.

- Yeah.

- They would just throw off their water, non-verbal signal, universal signal, to all the coal miners, we've had enough, we're going out on strike.

That way management had a difficult time finding out, who started the work stoppage.

- Wow, okay.

- Throw out the water to Kevin's book - Throw out the water that means we're going back up top.

- That's right - We're not spending anymore time down there.

- We've done enough.

- Okay, thank you, Charles.

E. Martin.

- You're very welcome.

- Wow, what a terrific visit.

This Coal Mine Museum in Christian County, has gotten smaller since Will died.

But Chuck is keeping it going, And since he lives out of town, he can be here one day a week.

So, it is open to the public on Thursday mornings.

But, if you call him, there's a chance that it could be opened by arrangement.

It's just a very fluid situation but as you can see, there's a lot to see here.

With another, Illinois story in Taylorville, I'm Mark MacDonald, thanks for watching.

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