Mount Olive: Mother Jones Is Buried on Route Sixty-Six

Mount Olive, Illinois, is where Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, chose to be buried. She died in nineteen thirty at an age she claimed was one hundred, though records suggest ninety-three, and she asked to be laid to rest in the Union Miners Cemetery here, alongside the men killed in the Virden Massacre of eighteen ninety-eight, when a clash between Chicago-Virden Coal Company guards and striking miners left about a dozen men dead on both sides. Mother Jones had spent decades organizing coal miners across Appalachia and the Midwest, was repeatedly arrested, and was described by a West Virginia prosecutor as the most dangerous woman in America.

The Virden dead and the organizer who honored them are buried together in a cemetery on the old Route Sixty-Six alignment, marked by a monument paid for by donations from miners. It is one of the few graves on the entire highway that belongs to someone who spent her life fighting the economy the highway was built to serve.