February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Ray O’Hanlon
It will be anything but a moment of silence for the dead.
On Friday afternoon, April 28, at 4:30 Central Standard Time, every Amtrak train in service at that moment across the United States will sound its whistle in remembrance of more than 50 Irish railroad workers who perished during construction of an Illinois railroad in the early 1850s.
In conjunction with the salute, a 6-foot high Celtic cross will be dedicated at the site of two cemetery plots in the bucolic village of Funk’s Grove, where the Irish workers died during the winter of 1852-53.
The dedication of the cross is being held in conjunction with Workers Memorial Day and its unveiling will be the culmination of efforts to publicly acknowledge the deaths of the immigrant Irish laborers who, to this day, remain anonymous.
The cross cost $12,500 and the money was raised by Central Illinois Irish Americans and labor unions.
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"There were 53 of them and they were working on the grading for the Alton and Sangamon Railroad in the winter of that year. Many of them were Famine refugees," said Greg Koos of the McLean County Museum in Bloomington.
Funk’s Grove is about 12 miles south of Bloomington and the village cemetery is about 600 yards from the present railroad track that serves as a main Union Pacific/Amtrak line connecting St. Louis with Chicago.
According to Koos, the Irish workers are believed to have died from cholera, a disease that all too often swept through railroad worker camps with frightening speed in the mid-19th century.
"The winter of 1852-53 was a bad one, but not so bad that work on the line was completely suspended," Koos said. "These men were doing rough work, the digging and the backwork. Many would have been in poor physical shape and were working in extreme cold with only poor shelter. The cholera would have taken them quickly."
Making a hard life worse for the immigrant Irish railroad workers was the fact that there were a number of anti-Irish organizations then at work in Illinois, including the Know Nothing party.
Following the fatal cholera outbreak, the men were buried without name markers and no record of their deaths was carried in local papers. The reason for this, according to Koos, was that cholera outbreaks were considered bad for business in a small town hoping to grow as a result of the new railroad.
In one key respect, however, the men were more fortunate than many of their fellow workers. Railroad workers who died were often buried in unmarked graves alongside the railroad when the work was being carried out in remote areas. The 53 Irish died in a place where there was actually a cemetery to hold their remains.
Largely as a result of this, the story of the men did survive the passage of time. It was passed down orally through generations of Irish families in the area. The cemetery itself also kept a record of the burials. The twin gravesites are marked "Irish workers" on old cemetery maps.
"I think this memorial will be meaningful to people. These men were industrial pioneers and anyone riding on the Amtrak line from St. Louis to Chicago these days is riding on the work of these men," Koos said.
One man who would have been aware early on of the work of the Irish railroad workers in Illinois was Abraham Lincoln. In the years before he became president, Lincoln, then a lawyer, rode the train lines of his adopted state while working the Eighth Circuit Court.
Koos said he hopes the new recognition given the lives and deaths of the Irish railroad workers of McLean County will serve as a rallying point for further study.
"Much is already known of the lives of Irish immigrants in the big cities such as Chicago. But relatively little is known of those Irish who lived, worked and died in the rural areas of Illinois and other Midwestern states," Koos said.
The Irish consul general in Chicago, Eamon Hickey, is expected to attend Friday’s ceremony in Funk’s Grove. Among the guests will be Terence O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers International Union.
The ceremony will begin at 3:30 p.m. with the music of an Irish piper Kevin Henry in the cemetery chapel. At 4, there will be a procession to the two mass gravesites, which are in a grove of maple trees.
At 4:30 p.m. the train whistles will sound across America and what for 150 years has been a mostly forgotten story will find a new resonance far beyond the edge of a small Midwestern town.