December 8, 1930 Mother Jones, is buried in Illinois cemetery

MOUNT OLIVE, Ill. • The mahogany casket was flanked by union banners and candles. On the wall were photographs of four miners killed during a strike 32 years before.

Mourners passed reverently, trailed by children “strangely hushed by the solemnity of the occasion,” scribbled a Post-Dispatch reporter. Hundreds more quietly waited outside the Odd Fellows Temple to view the body of Mary Harris Jones, whom they knew as “Mother.” Jones called the union men “my boys.”

Mother Jones was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive on Dec. 8, 1930, one week after she died at a friend’s home in Silver Spring, Md. She claimed to have been 100 years old.

Even if she was only 93, as her baptism records in Ireland suggest, Jones spent four decades as a sharp-tongued and relentless agitator for workers, firing up strikers from Pennsylvania to Colorado. She called John D. Rockefeller a “high-class burglar,” derided unsympathetic judges as “scabs” and exhorted workers everywhere: “Join the union.”

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