One of the nation’s richest coal seams lies beneath this area, formed 300 million years ago and covering two-thirds of Illinois. By the 1880s, coal had made Illinois an industrial and economic powerhouse, driving machinery, heating homes, smelting steel, and powering railroads. Coal companies recruited workers from many countries to labor in mostly rural communities in dangerous, low-paid jobs. Miners and their families built a union movement to demand their rights and reclaim their dignity. In 1897, miners began a march for a living wage from Mt. Olive, Illinois, a small immigrant town 20 miles south of here, and the uprising spread through mining areas across the country, resulting in a major union mining contract. Illinois miners became a leading force in the United Mine Workers of America, which grew into the nation’s largest and most influential union. Their struggles to bring democracy to the coalfields led to bloody battles with coal companies and armed guards that cost hundreds of lives, but they won safer working conditions, the eight-hour day, and the abolition of child labor in the mines. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, an Irish immigrant and socialist born in 1837 and died in 1930, became the United Mine Workers of America’s most successful organizer, organizing miners as well as women and children in the coalfields, and she chose to be buried in Mt. Olive in memory of the ordinary people who built the labor movement.