The Clover Leaf Train Depot and the Illinois Central Depot at Glen Carbon, Illinois.

Glen Carbon boasted two railroad depots that served the passenger trains: one off of Old Meridian Road on the Nickel Plate tracks (sometimes called the Clover Leaf) and one off of Collinsville Avenue on the Illinois Central. At its peak, as many as twenty-two passenger trains served the depots. It was very common to travel to St. Louis and come back the same day.

CLOVER LEAF TRAIN DEPOT, GLEN CARBON, ILLINOIS

Clover Leaf Train Depot right after it was moved to Glen Carbon, Illinois. The name is not painted on the station yet. Madison Coal Corporation Mine № 1 is in the background. The man in the photo is J. F. Dickman the railroad agent. (Jan. 26, 1900)

Clover Leaf Train Depot was located east of Meridian Road between the tracks just north of Miner Park. Meridian road is on the far left. The Clover Leaf Railroad later became the Nickel Plate Railroad. J. F. Dickman was still the railroad agent. Coal mine № 1 is at the far right. A brick structure of the mine is now occupied as a residence.

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ILLINOIS CENTRAL DEPOT, GLEN CARBON, ILLINOIS
In October 1893, John Tolocker bought the first ticket sold from Glen Carbon to St. Louis at the handsome new Illinois Central Depot at Collinsville Street. The Illinois Central (IC) was the last of the three railroads directly serving old Glen Carbon to be developed, and for most of its history was owned an operated by the IC. It was always operated as a standard gauge line, and was also the only one of the three "steam" railroads to build outward from Glen Carbon, rather than into Glen Carbon from another point. IC's predecessor, the St. Louis & Eastern, built east toward Marine from Glen Carbon in 1889.

There was a particularly close relationship between the IC and the Madison Coal Corporation, which had two mines on the IC. The railroad company had sidings for each mine near the mine tipple, where coal could be loaded directly into open-top cars.


As important and interesting as passenger service was for Glen Carbon and every other community, it was always freight that was almost any railroad's bread and butter. The several mines which gave Glen Carbon its origins were also the most important source of revenue for local railroads.

Passenger traffic was heavy at the Illinois Central Deport on Collinsville Avenue in the early 1900s. It was very common to travel to St. Louis and back in the same day for shopping or entertainment.

The Story of Chicago's Haymarket Square Riot on May 4, 1886.

To understand what happened during the Haymarket Square riot (aka Haymarket Massacre or Haymarket Affair), it is necessary to go back to the summer of 1884. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the predecessor of the American Federation of Labor, declared May 1, 1886, to be the beginning of a nationwide movement for the eight-hour workday.

This wasn't a radical idea since Illinois workers and federal employees were supposed to have been covered by an eight-hour day law since 1867. The problem was that the federal government failed to enforce its own law, and in Illinois, employers forced workers to sign waivers of the law as a condition of employment.

With two years to plan, the organized labor movement in Chicago and throughout Illinois sent questionnaires to employers to see how they felt about shorter hours and other issues, including child labor. Slogans and songs were written like "The Eight Hour Day" everywhere, and slogans were heard like "Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will!" or "Shortening the Hours Increase the Pay."

Although a simplistic solution to unemployment and low wages, the Eight-Hour Day Movement caught the imagination of workers across the country. With its strong labor movement, Chicago had the nation's largest demonstration on Saturday, May 1, 1886, when reportedly 80,000 workers marched up Michigan Avenue arm-in-arm carrying their union banners.

The unions most strongly represented were the building trades. This solidarity shocked some employers, who feared a workers' revolution, while others quickly signed agreements for shorter hours at the same pay.

Two of the organizers of these demonstrations were Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons and her husband, Albert Parsons. 

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Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons was described by the Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters."

Lucy had been born a slave in Texas in about 1853. Her heritage was African-American, Native American, and Mexican. She worked for the Freedman's Bureau after the Civil War. After marrying Albert, they moved to Chicago, where she turned her attention to writing and organizing women's sewing workers. Albert was a printer, a member of the Knights of Labor, editor of the labor paper The Alarm, and one of the founders of the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly.

On May 4, two substitute speakers ran over to Haymarket Square at the last minute. They had been attending a meeting of sewing workers organized by Lucy Parsons and her fellow labor organizer, Lizzie Holmes of Geneva, Illinois. These last-minute speakers were Albert Parsons, who had just returned from Ohio, and Samuel Fielden, an English-born Methodist lay preacher who worked in the labor movement.

But when one speaker urged the dwindling crowd to "throttle" the law, 176 officers under Inspector John Bonfield marched to the meeting and ordered people to disperse. Then someone threw the first dynamite bomb ever used in the peacetime history of the United States at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police, carrying Winchester repeater rifles, drew their guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded.

Mayor Harrison quickly banned meetings and processions. Police made picketing impossible and suppressed the radical press. Chicago newspapers publicized unsubstantiated police theories of anarchist conspiracies, and they published attacks on the foreign-born and calls for revenge, matching the anarchists in inflammatory language. The violence demoralized strikers, and only a few well-organized strikes continued. Police arrested hundreds of people but never determined the identity of the bomb-thrower. 

Eventually, seven policemen died, and only one was directly accountable for the bomb. Four workers were also killed, but few textbooks mention this fact.

The next day, martial law was declared in Chicago and throughout the nation. Anti-labor governments worldwide used the Chicago incident to crush local union movements. In Chicago, labor leaders were rounded up, houses were entered without search warrants, and union newspapers were closed.

Amidst public clamor for revenge, however, eight anarchists, including prominent speakers and writers, were tried for murder. Fielden, Parsons, and a young carpenter named Louis Lingg were accused of throwing the bomb. The partisan Judge Joseph E. Gary conducted the trial, and all 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants. Lacking credible evidence that the defendants threw the bomb or organized the bomb-throwing, prosecutors focused on their writings and speeches. 

Lingg had witnesses to prove he was over a mile away at the time. The two-month-long trial ranks as one of the most notorious in American history. The Chicago Tribune even offered to pay money to the jury if it found the eight men guilty. The jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight. On August 20, 1886, the jury reported its guilty verdict with the death penalty by hanging for seven of the Haymarket Eight and 15 years of hard labor for Oscar Neebe[1].

On November 10, the day before the execution, Samuel Gompers came from Washington to appeal to Governor Oglesby for the last time. The national and worldwide pressure finally forced the Governor to change the sentences of Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab to imprisonment for life. Although 5 of the 8 were still to be hanged the next day, on the morning of November 10, Louis Lingg was found in his cell, his head half blown away by a dynamite cap. The event was most mysterious since Lingg hoped to receive a pardon that very day. Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Albert Parsons and August Spies were hanged on November 11, 1887.

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"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today." - August Spies' last words, shouted from the gallows.

Despite protests worldwide, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Albert Parsons and August Spies were hanged on November 11, 1887. As they were marched to the gallows, the men sang the Marseillaise (French National Anthem). The law was vindicated. Four of the Chicago anarchists pay the penalty for their crimes. Illustration in the Cook County jail at the moment before execution.

In June of 1893, Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the 3 men still alive and condemned the entire judicial system that had allowed this injustice.

Anti-labor governments worldwide used the Chicago incident to crush local union movements.

The real issues of the Haymarket Affair were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to free assembly, the right to a fair trial by a jury of peers, and the right of workers to organize and fight for things like the eight-hour workday.

While textbooks tell about the bomb, they fail to mention the reason for the meeting or what happened afterward. Some books even fail to say that many of those who were tried were not even at the Haymarket meeting but were arrested simply because there were union organizers. Sadly, these rights have been abridged many times in American history. During the civil rights marches of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, we saw similar violations of citizens' constitutional rights.

The Haymarket Affair took on a worldwide dimension in July 1889, when a delegate from the American Federation of Labor recommended at a labor conference in Paris that May 1 be set aside as International Labor Day in memory of Haymarket martyrs and the injustice of the Haymarket Affair. Today, in almost every major industrial nation, May Day is Labor Day. Even Great Britain and Israel have passed legislation declaring this date a national holiday in recent years.

For years, half of the American Labor movement observed May 1 as Labor Day, while the other half followed the first Monday in September. After the Russian Revolution, the May 1 date was mistakenly associated with communism, and in a protest against Soviet policy, May 1 was first proclaimed Law Day in the 1960s.

The Haymarket Martyrs Monument was dedicated at Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, to honor the anarchists framed and executed for the bombing at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. 

A monument commemorating the "Haymarket martyrs" was erected in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery in 1893. In 1889, a statue honoring the dead police was erected in the Haymarket. Toppled by student radicals in 1969 and 1970, it was moved to the Chicago Police Academy. 

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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[1] Oscar Neebe, who is reported to have said: "So I am only sorry, your honor — that is if you can stop it or help it — I will ask you to do it — that is, to hang me, too; for I think it is more honorable to die suddenly than to be killed by inches. I have a family and children; if they know their father is dead, they will bury him. They can go to the grave and kneel by the side of it, but they can't go to the penitentiary and see their father, who was convicted for a crime that he hasn't had anything to do with. That is all I have got to say. Your honor, I am sorry I will not be hung with the rest of the men."

The Chicago Coal Famine of 1903.

In the winter months of 1903 there was a severe coal shortage in Chicago, Illinois.

It all began on May 12, 1902 when John Mitchell, who in 1898, at the age of 28, had become president of the United Mine Workers of America, pulled the miners in the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania off the job. Firemen, engineers, and pump men followed on June 2nd, and within two weeks 147,000 workers had left the mines. Of these 30,000 abandoned the fields for good with 8,000 to 10,000 returning to Europe.

The strike finally ended on October 23, 1902 in a precedent-setting agreement, it being the first significant labor dispute in which the United States government intervened. It was such a significant event that toward the end of his career Samuel Gompers wrote, “Several times I have been asked what in my opinion was the most important single incident in the labor movement in the United States and I have invariably replied: the strike of the anthracite miners in Pennsylvania...from then on the miners became not merely human machines to produce coal but men and citizens.”

All that is significant today, but back in late 1902 all that mattered was that no hard coal was being mined for nearly a half-year at the time when cities should have been building up stockpiles in preparation for the long winter. Conditions deteriorated quickly once cold weather set in.

In Detroit on December 31st Mrs. W. T. Richardson, a boarding house keeper, entered the office of Stanley B. Smith & Co., a coal dealer, and pointed a revolver at the clerk on duty along with $7.50 and demanded a ton of coal after her son had failed to get the order earlier in the day. According to the Chicago Tribune the clerk “gazed down the blue barrel of the weapon and promptly produced the order.”

In early January the combination of a shortage of coal and a local teamsters’ strike forced officials at the Lincoln Park zoo to reduce heat in the animal and plant houses to save precious fuel. By January 4th less than a day’s supply remained. “After that,” The Tribune reported, “it is either coal or chills for the elephant, lions and other captives from the tropics.” The next day park workers were put to work cutting down dead trees in the park and stacking up the wood next to the zoo’s power house in case it became necessary to move from coal to wood.

By January 6th the Western Steel Car and Foundry Company in Hegewisch shut down, throwing 3,700 men out of work, because there was not enough coal to keep the machinery running.

On that same day Mrs. Margaret Perry and her three daughters died in a fire at the Hotel Somerset at Wabash and Twelfth Street. The Tribune began its coverage of the tragedy, “Had it not been for the high price and scarcity of fuel, Mrs. Margaret Perry and her three children, whose lives were sacrificed, would not have been in the hotel, as they left their home at 2535 Indiana avenue some time ago because they thought it would be cheaper to board than to attempt to heat their own apartments during the winter.” 

On January 8th the Salvation Army began offering coal to the poor of the city at the rate of five cents for a 20-pound basket. The next day the situation in Toledo, Ohio had reached the point where a physician’s certificate authenticating the fact that there was illness in a home and that coal was necessary to safeguard the patient was required in order to buy a ton of coal.

As the middle of January approached the head of the Dunning Institution, home of the Cook County Insane Asylum, said that he would not be able to keep the buildings warm after 2 am on January 12th. 

Even though a coal relief fund established by Mayor Carter Harrison had reached $2,976, casualties began to mount. Mrs. Esther Everett, 65, was found frozen to death in her bed at 3232 LaSalle Street. A six-month old baby died from exposure in an unheated home at 1341 S. Western Avenue. An unidentified man, between 65 and 70, was killed by a Lake Shore train while he was picking up coal on the tracks at Wood Street.

On January 10, 1903, Three hundred citizens of Arcola, Illinois stopped an Illinois Central train carrying 16 cars of coal to Chicago. An offer was made to buy the coal, but officials refused to sell it. At that point the mob, led by the pastor of the Presbyterian and Free Methodist churches, the presidents of both of the town’s banks, and a town policeman, confiscated the cars and the coal.

By January 19th things in Chicago had reached the point where the city council appropriated $25,000 to be used to distribute coal to the needy, asking the corporation counsel to investigate the legality of establishing a municipal coal yard.

Three days later 16-year-old William Stohmeyer went to the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad’s freight yard, carrying a sack to pick up coal that had fallen on the tracks. Martin J. Ward, a railway employee, fired at the boy, wounding him mortally. A crowd of 500 people soon gathered, and Ward ran to the yard office where he locked himself in the building. Police dispersed the crowd and freed Ward, who was then booked on suspicion of murder.

On February 2nd the Chicago began to sell coal from city yards in half-ton lots with orders being taken at the city’s pumping stations. A disgruntled coal dealer observed, “Amateurish mistakes have confused the mayor’s coal committee in its administration of the municipal coal yards... Instead of using simple methods the authorities started the most complex tactics imaginable, and now they are surprised to find themselves in a muddle.”

Less than two weeks later the city got out of the coal business. “The contractors have refused to send us any more coal to sell,” a Central Park station engineer explained.

Finally, a combination of warmer weather, an increasing supply, and more expeditious transportation ended the “coal famine” of 1903. Wherever the blame was placed, it did not hide the fact that real human beings suffered during that long winter of 1903. 

In a February 3rd editorial, the Tribune observed philosophically that one day everyone would be short of coal because there would be no more left to mine. “Then nature will step in,” the opinion piece observed, “Nature is always ready for contingencies, and, supplemented by man’s ingenuity and skill, life probably will be as easy without coal or wood as it is with them, and certainly cleaner and healthier. ‘Star eyed science’ will not ‘waft us home the message of despair.’ It will find agencies in the sun, in the sea, and in the winds; and in the earth and in the atmosphere it will find unending supplies of that marvelous electric fluid of whose properties as a power in nature we still know but little.”

Chicago Tribune Article, January 12, 1903. - DEATHS CHARGED TO COAL FAMINE