There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 16, 1898
Mount Olive, Illinois – Funerals Held for Virden Martyrs
From the Springfield Illinois State Journal of October 15, 1898:
Mount Olive Mourns
—–
Schools and Stores Closed on the
Day of Miners’ Funerals.
Ernst Kaemmerer
Carlinville, Ill., Oct. 14-To-day was the saddest in Mount Olive’s history. Every business house in the town and the public schools were closed by proclamation of Mayor Fuchs. Not a shaft in the district was operated. The funeral services over the remains of Ellis Smith, Joseph Gitterle and Ernest Kamerer, the Mount Olive miners killed at Virden, were held in the opera house at 2 o’clock. Private services had been held earlier by the pastor of each denomination to which the dead miners belonged. The opera house was thronged. Services were conducted by W. D. Ryan, state secretary of the United Mine Workers. Attorney Thomas Williamson delivered the funeral oration. The line of march was taken up, headed by the Mount Olive band, followed by hearses with the three corpses. Two thousand visiting union men from Staunton, Gillespie, Hornsby, Litchfield, Sorrento, Worden and Glean Carbon, city officials, school children bearing flowers, and citizens. It was the largest procession of the kind ever known in Mount Olive and grief manifested was heart-rending.
