Girard: Coal Country Between Springfield and Carlinville

Girard sits in Macoupin County in the soft-coal belt of central Illinois, where Route Sixty-Six continued south from Springfield toward St. Louis. The town developed in the late nineteenth century on the coal mining economy that ran through this part of Illinois, where underground seams of bituminous coal provided fuel for the industrial Midwest.

By the time Route Sixty-Six was designated in nineteen twenty-six, Girard was a working-class farm and mining town with a railroad connection and enough population to support a commercial strip along the highway. The coal mines of Macoupin County were also organizing grounds for the United Mine Workers of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, part of the labor history that would later make nearby Mount Olive, a good stretch farther down the road, the burial place of union organizer Mother Jones.