New Monument Hails the 1800s’ Rail Laborers

FUNK'S GROVE, Ill. — 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 50 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. Details of their deaths have been lost over time.

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 Laborers International Union.