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Monument Built to Railroad BuildersBy JAY HUGHES, Associated Press Writer
FUNK'S GROVE, Ill. (AP) -- With the lilting wail of traditional Celtic music wafting through the trees, a monument was dedicated Friday at the site of a mass grave where a group of mostly Irish railroad laborers were buried some 150 years ago. Local and national labor leaders attended the Workers Memorial Day ceremony honoring the laborers, who died while laying a rail line from Springfield to Bloomington in the 1850s. Simultaneously, Amtrak trains across the country blew their whistles in tribute to the thousands of workers, mostly immigrants, buried in unmarked graves across the continent who died while building the nation's railroad system. ''Workers are what made this country; immigrants are who made this great country,'' said Terence O'Sullivan, general president of the Laborer's International Union. Funds for the $12,000 monument were raised through donations from labor unions, Irish-American societies and individuals. Kevin Johnson, an Amtrak spokesman in Chicago, said the Workers Memorial Day tribute was appropriate to current workers and as a way to honor the anonymous thousands laid to rest beside the rails. ''Our trains still run on tracks that many of these people lost their lives building,'' he said. The exact story behind the 50 Irish workers buried at Funk's Grove has been lost over time, but likely parallels that of others who fled the potato famine in the 1850s. At the time, railroad workers lived in squalid camps along the rails they were constructing. Malnourished and underpaid, many arrived at the unsanitary ''shanty'' camps already weakened by their voyage to this country. Mike Matejka, a field representative for the North Central Illinois Laborers' District Council, spent months reading newspapers from 1851-1853 and poring over old records in preparation for the dedication. He said period newspapers have many accounts of large numbers of railroad workers dying during cholera epidemics. The monument, a marble Celtic cross, bears the same inscription in English and Gaelic. ''These immigrants from Ireland were driven from the land of their birth by famine and disease,'' it reads in part. ''They arrived sick and penniless, and took hard and dangerous jobs building the Chicago & Alton Railroad. Known but to God, they rest here in individual anonymity -- far from the old homes of their hearts -- yet forever short of the new homes of their hopes.'' AP-NY-04-28-00 2208EDT< Copyright © Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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