In her article “Coal Mining and the University of Illinois” (Illinois Heritage, July-August 2023), Helaine Silverman (co-director of the Mythic Mississippi Project) noted important coal resources in Vermillion County and that rail transported coal as a bulk freight commodity to Urbana and Champaign where there were almost two dozen coal distributors.
Indeed, in 1899 Danville’s population was 25,000 largely on the basis of employment in the surrounding coal and brick industries. A network of railroads intersected the city, enabling efficient shipping for manufacturers. This history is represented in murals in downtown Danville.
The text of the mural (109 Van Buren Street) above tells us: “The first true strip mining in the country came in 1865 when Henry Cramer opened a riverbank in the Hungry Hollow area west of Danville. Strip mining employed over 4,000 people in the county, helping Vermilion County grow and prosper. Underground mining followed in 1870 when A.C. Daniels sunk a shaft for the Ellsworth Coal Company in what is now Vermilion Heights. Vermilion County coal production ranked first in the nation by 1925. In 1932, the United Electric Coal Co. withdrew from the area, unable to obtain more stripping land.”
And the mural below (2 East Main Street) speaks to the importance of the railroads for Danville’s industries, including coal. Its text tell us: “The C&EI’s “Dixieland” is depicted as it stopped in Danville on its way to Chicago. In the early 1900’s, Danville was a prime location for railroads. Among those were the C&EI, the Wabash, the New York Central, the Big Four, and the Illinois Terminal. The station shown is the former C&EI passenger station. It’s mahogany wood, tiled floors and vaulted ceilings rivaled its counterparts in major cities. At one time railroads here employed 3,000 workers.”
Westville, located just a few miles south of Danville, was itself an epicenter of coal mining – a legacy of which is recalled in a memorial dedicated to the Westville area coal miners (1968). The memorial is at the entrance to Zamberletti Park.
And a bar and liquor distributor called “Coal Miners” (1510 N. Franklin Street) is owned by a gentleman who grandfathers were miners.
As in so many coal towns, mining attracted a “melting pot of nations”. A 1902 article published in Missionary Review by Margaret Blake Robinson depicted Westville in this way: “Westville is a small village of less than a thousand inhabitants, but it has sixteen saloons—there is an awfully dead sameness about the place; dirt, squalor, and the houses all shaped alike, of the same size, fashioned according to the same utilitarian and unartistic principles, and all owned by the mine owners. Since the formation of a miners’ union the men only work eight hours a day and receive fair wages. The miners (those who dig for the coal) average about $2.50 a day, while the rock men, timbermen, cagers, and trackrmen get about $2.10. Accidents are so frequent that a miner’s wife said to me: ‘A natural death is such a strange thing here that when one hears that So and-So is dead, they ask at once, ‘When was he killed?'”
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