Cherry Mine Memorial
November 13, 1909. 259 dead in eight minutes.
A hay cart caught fire from a kerosene lamp. The flame reached the wooden support timbers. Two hundred and fifty-nine men and boys — many of them Italian and Eastern European immigrants — died in the worst coal mine disaster in Illinois history and the third-deadliest in American history. The bodies were brought ten miles south to LaSalle for processing.
Eight days after the fire, twenty miners walked out alive. The disaster directly produced Illinois's 1910 Mine Safety Laws and the 1911 Workmen's Compensation Act — two of the foundational pieces of American labor law, both written because of what happened in Cherry, Illinois. When Tom Cawley was running First Street thirty years later, the men in his bar at midnight were old enough to remember which neighbors had not come home.