“Lutheran high school as hellmouth?” is a headline that I’d hoped to read when I heard that the ground at 3500 W. Washington beneath Springfield’s new Lutheran High School opened up beneath it in 2022. Disappointingly, no bloody hand had thrust up out of its grave to pull innocents down into the bowels of the earth. The cause of the rupture was more prosaic. Pillars of coal propping up a long-abandoned coal mine hundreds of feet below the school had collapsed.
The earth opened up only a crack but through that crack Jori Lewis saw another Springfield that had been hidden from her view. The young writer and sometime journalist who now resides in Chicago and Senegal grew up on the west side not far from the Lutherans’ property. As a girl she knew of the Springfield area only what she could see and what she could see was corn. What she couldn’t see was uncounted miles of tunnels that miners had burrowed through the No. 5 coal seam like termites through a sill plate during the decades when mining was Springfield’s biggest industry. Her church, her middle school, her favorite park – all undercut.
When I was her age a Springfield kid could still see artifacts of that furious excavation. Nature put coal almost everywhere Downstate, but mine owners choose where to put mines and they usually sink the shafts next to rail lines, even if those lines were in the crowded city. As a boy I’d bicycle to and fro to downtown from the east side past the rusting surface works and slag pile of Peabody’s No. 57 mine, The “Capital.” Such relics did not last long. Atop the entrance to the Citizens Coal Company “A” mine the city built a new fire station and Peabody’s Capital mine was converted into a baseball park.
Jori Lewis’s curiosity was piqued, so she set out to uncover more buried history. What she found she recalled in an essay that appeared in the New York Review of Books (“Buried Sunshine”) of July 26, 2025. You start a journey in an underground mine and it is easy to get lost. Lewis’s excursion has her wandering here and there from coal to slavery to labor history. The result is not a bildungsroman, more like Mister Rogers explores the neighborhood. Among her stops was Macoupin County’s Mt. Olive and Gillespie, the birthplace of the Progressive Miners of America, a rebel union group whose fraternal violence fueled open warfare in and around Sangamon in the 1930s. Along the way she introduces readers to Virden and Pana, Mother Jones and John L. Lewis – giant names that used to be on the front pages but are now reduced in every way to tourist brochures.
Happily, museums can un-bury history too. Lewis visited the Illinois Coal Museum at Gillespie (https://www.gillespiecoalmuseum.org/); well-funded and drawing on recent scholarship, it is superior to most local history museums. (Too bad Lincoln didn’t dig coal instead of splitting rails; Springfield might have a first-class museum about the coal industry here too.) Such displays tend toward the celebratory, and with reason. Underground mining was hard and men who did it were proud to do it well. The mines made towns different from their farm town neighbors (if only in the number of taverns they supported) and they are proud of that too. The darker side – the racial and ethnic antagonisms, the violence committed by the owners’ goons against the miners and by miners against each other, the social violence practiced when men with money exploit men without it – are left to the historians.
It is a story that I know fairly well, but Lewis opened a crack in my world too, out of which walked miner Big Henry Stephens, the Black labor union activist and civil rights agitator in Sangamon and Christian counties. I’d never heard of him. Carl Sandburg was an itinerant labor-party organizer as well a poet who knew Stephens (who died in 1939). Sandburg reimagined one of these encounters (slightly, one suspects) in a 1917 poem “The Sayings of Henry Stephens.” A lifelong aversion to Sandburg’s verse left Stephens buried on the shelf of my library all these years. (For more about Stephens, see https://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/harry-stephens-miner-carl-sandburg-muse/.)
Future Springfieldans need not rely on a poet for their history. Alert readers will recall that in June the Illinois State Historical Society erected a memorial marker to Henry Stephens at 11th and Washington in Springfield near where he used to live. Markers recalling our inconvenient citizens are to be praised, although I can’t help wishing they’d installed this one on the grounds of the country club or at least near a high school. No matter. As Lewis reminds us, you learn your history where you find it.
James Krohe Jr. is the author of Midnight at Noon: A History of Coal Mining in Sangamon County, Sangamon County Historical Society, 1975. It can be read at https://www.jameskrohejr.com/article-midnight-p-1-schs.
This article appears in September 11-17, 2025.
