On our drive down to St Louis from Chicago, we stopped in Springfield for the night. Kevin went for a run the next morning and not far from our campsite was the Lincoln Memorial Garden & Nature Center, a beautiful place that represents the landscape Abraham Lincoln would have known growing up in the Midwest.
From the garden’s website:
“Designed by internationally-known landscape architect Jens Jensen, this 100-acre site features over 6 miles of scenic trails that wind through the Garden’s restored prairies, woodlands and wetlands. The garden beckons to thousands of visitors year round—families, birdwatchers, photographers, artists, nature enthusiasts, and school children—to learn about nature and enjoy the wildflowers, trees and wildlife.”
And it’s quite wooded. Imagine building a log cabin surrounded by the wildlife and the wilderness! It remains a beautiful place for peace and freedom.
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Not far up the road from the Lincoln Memorial Garden, I saw a historical marker sign: “Mother Jones Memorial and Burial Site”. Mother Jones sounded familiar…isn’t that a magazine?
Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) from History in the Margins
From History in the Margins, I learned that Mary Harris Jones, affectionately known as Mother Jones, is the reason for many things we may take for granted: a safe workplace, child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, and paid time off.
She was an important figure in the labor movement.
Pamela Toler says in her article:
“I had been vaguely aware that Mother Jones was a union organizer, but I had no idea how important she was at her time.
Mother Jones was in some ways the Grandma Moses of union organizers: in fact, when she was testifying before a committee in the Senate on labor issues, a senator mocked her as the “grandmother of all agitators.” (She replied that she would someday like to be called the “great-grandmother of all agitators.”) At the point that she began her career as a union organizers, Mary Harris Jones was a poor, widowed, Irish immigrant. She had survived the potato famine, the loss of her husband and four children in a yellow fever epidemic, and the Chicago fire, which destroyed her successful dressmaking shop.
After each loss, she reinvented herself. In the 1890s, she reinvented herself one more time, as “Mother Jones.” The name was subversive: playing against and with nineteenth century domestic stereotypes of women. Mary Jones cast herself as the mother of oppressed people everywhere. At a time when women were “supposed” to be quiet and stay home, Mother Jones was a street orator with no fixed address, who traveled the United States for twenty-five years, moving from cause to cause. She had no interest in being “ladylike.” As she told a group of women in New York: “Never mind if you are not lady-like, you are woman-like. God Almighty made the woman and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
Jones rose to prominence as an organizer for the United Mine workers, who paid her a stipend, but she went wherever she felt she was needed. She worked with striking garment workers in Chicago, bottle washers in Milwaukee breweries, Pittsburgh steelworkers, and El Paso streetcar operators, helping them fight against 12-hour days, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the financial servitude of company housing and the company store.
Her motto was “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living”—the world would be a better place if we all adopted it as our own.”
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So back in the late 1800’s, work-life balance was NOT a thing. We, as Americans, had to fight for it.
As we round out 250 years of America, remember the rebels, movers, shakers, and those who thought for themselves to come up with new ways of doing things. They are the foundation of our nation. Mary Harris Jones lies here in Mt Olive, Illinois, a legend of her time.
Thank you Mother Jones for being in our world and changing it.
Memorial from History in the Margins
