On May 1, 2015, a wreath laying ceremony will take place at the Mother Jones Historic Marker in Adelphi Maryland, near Washington, D.C., near the place where Mother Jones died. This ceremony is hosted near the historic marker to Mother Jones by a group of trade unionists as part of the D.C. Labor Fest. If you are in the area, we hope you will join. We know that the people who honor labor’s heritage have a deep spirit of struggle. The marker was the result of efforts initiated by  of Saul Schniderman, President of the Library of Congress Professional Guild, AFSCME Local 2910 (Council 26), who is on the board of the Mother Jones Heritage Project and lives in the D.C. area. He’s also on the board of the Labor Heritage Foundation. Saul made it his personal quest to find the location of the home where Jones was cared for at the end of her life, and in doing so discovered a story of the devotion of a farm woman to the “grand old champion of labor” that was also worth preserving. Mother Jones said that her home was “wherever there was a fight for justice.” But she had friends from struggles across the country, homes where she was welcome at any time. As she grew older, and suffered severe rheumatism, she had to give up participating in crusades for labor rights. She settled in at the home of Terrence and Emma Powderly in D.C. for a while. Through them, Jones met Lillie May and Walter Burgess, who owned a truck farm in a fairly isolated area of Maryland. As Jones declined further, Lillie May lovingly took care of her full time, at great cost to her own health. An amazing list of people came to visit the farm, from labor leaders to newspaper reporters. On May 1, 1930, Burgess hosted Jones birthday party, with 1000 people attending. It was front page news in papers across the country. On November 1, 1930, Jones died at the farm house. Six years later, 50,000 coal miners and others gathered to dedicate the Mother Jones monument in Mt. Olive, in memory of Mother Jones who was buried here in December 1930. Among the speakers at that event was Lillie May Burgess, who had never traveled far from her home before. Burgess spoke of how she had grown to care deeply for the fine woman who had “faced machine guns” in the cause of labor rights. This week people will come together to remember Jones at the marker near the Burgess farmhouse. The story of how Saul found the Burgess farm and more about the last days of Mother Jones life is in the bibliography section. We also now have a Maryland & D.C. section of our sites and stories. Do you have something to share? Join us in telling these stories. Saul likes to remind us of the adage from folklore, “dig where you stand.” Not only did he excavate this story, but he has continued to inspire others to keep digging. He publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter, Friday’s Folklore. You can subscribe by sending an e-mail to fridaysfolklore@gmail.com |   with the word subscribe in the subject line. One of the things our museum and heritage project will accomplish is to connect people across the globe in uncovering more of these stories and reminding us of the heritage of the working class and our connections across time and place. Saul’s way of digging is an inspiration to us all. Lillie May Burgess, who cared for Mother Jones as she lay dying, speaks at the Mt. Olive Mother Jones Monument, 1936. Ozanic photo. Update: you can see more about Saul's story of finding the resting place on our Stories Page of this website, including the full page article about Saul's digging.

Today is October 12th, Coal Miners Day. It used to be a big deal in Illinois, a day of commemoration when thousands of miners took a day off from work, joining their families to  celebrate the heritage of mine community unionism. It marked the day when miners were killed in Virden, Illinois fighting the Chicago coal empire that sought to defeat the unions established during the living wage strike of 1897. By the end of that day in October 1898, 13 were killed, but they had stopped the designs of the Chicago-Virden Coal Company barons. You can read a little more about it here. The cemetery owner at Mt. Olive didn’t like the idea of the commemorations, so in 1899, the bodies of the miners from Mt. Olive who died in that battle were disinterred and re-buried in the the Union Miners Cemetery of the United Mine Workers local, and from that point on, the union established rituals and commemorations that built a sense of union heritage and rebellion in the southern regions of Illinois. It’s a story that isn’t much known anymore, but was part of a folk heritage elaborated on in a confusing way since the mines in the area have closed down. Union Miners Cemetery was a unique place, a site of a “spirit-thread” of history. Later, Mother Jones asked to be buried in the cemetery, with the notion that by doing so she would use her fame to ask people to remember the ordinary men and women who built unionism in Illinois and the United States. At the time, 40,000 people attended her funeral. Mother Jones was a folk hero at the time. She fought for democratic, inclusive unionism, the kind able to build a new civilization based on the worth of every human being, males and females, white and black, citizen and non-citizen, waged and unwaged labor. That’s our purpose too–to not only recover the struggles associated with Mother Jones, but to remember the ordinary people who contributed to making history. And to think about the struggles for power that were at the heart of mine community unionism. These communities deserve more than the dustbin of history, living in a secondary status because power resides at the top. Most of them struggle to survive as coal is mined with less labor or the mines have shut down. The Mother Jones Foundation in Springfield, Illinois has kept the day alive since 1984, long after most of the coal miners who had vivid memories of the origins of the day were gone. Last week folks gathered for the commemoration (and miners in earllier times didn’t always commemorate on the exact date). “Pray for the Dead, and Fight Like Hell for the Living,” we proclaimed, following Mother Jones’ famous words. I find it fitting that we launch this new website and our effort to make a museum in Mt. Olive Illinois, where the Union Miners Cemetery is now a national historic place, 115 years after the first commemoration. Our project seeks to remember this history, to think about its relevance to the present. We seek to establish a museum in Mt. Olive, as well as labor trails that would go from Pullman, where Mother Jones got her start, down to southern Illinois which was devastated by the decline in coal mining, but which is roiled by some of the same issues of lack of economic and resource control that roiled people in the era in which people rebelled more than a century ago. For now, we invite you to explore what is there. Click all of the drop down menus to see what we have posted.