Farming and Mining Towns of Montgomery, Macoupin, and Madison Counties:
These towns began as farming communities, typically along a rail line, and in the late 1800s developed coal mines. There were two associated periods of immigration from Europe—first came the farmers and later the miners.

The Illinois Labor History Society best describes the significance of this region:
As Muslims go to Mecca, there is a shrine in Illinois that deserves a pilgrimage by all labor-minded persons. It is the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. It offers no miraculous visions or cures; but each one who visits will be touched, for this is the resting place of that “grandmother of agitators,” Mary “Mother” Jones; and this is a place filled with the spirit of good union men. They are the coal miners she called “her boys,” among whom she asked to be buried at the time of her death in 1930, at the age of 100. Beyond the wrought iron gate to the little burial ground rises a granite obelisk on which is a great medallion bearing the likeness of Mother Jones. She is guarded on either side by a larger-than-life bronze statue of a coal miner with his sledge. At the base is a simple stone nestled in the grass, Mother Mary Jones. Among the tombstones in the Union Miners Cemetery is that of “General” Alexander Bradley, surely the most flamboyant figure in all of labor history. Bradley got his military nickname as a reference to his service in Coxey’s Army, that fabulous cross-country march of the unemployed which culminated in a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 1894.

Home again in Mt. Olive, Bradley became a self-appointed organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, which had scarcely 400 members in Illinois at that time. Yet, Bradley and a handful of area miners resolved at a secret meeting in the woods to join in a nation wide strike called by the UMWA for July 4, 1897. With Bradley at their head, the miners marched to coal camps in Belleville, Edwardsville, Glen Carbon, Collinsville exhorting the men to “pour the oil from their lamps” and join the strike, which they did. Wearing his favorite outfit, a top hat and Prince Albert coat, an umbrella in hand, “General” Bradley took the train, alone, to DuQuoin, 75 miles away. Again, his eloquence (and perhaps his appearance) was rewarded. DuQuoin’s miners agreed to join the strike. The Union Miners Cemetery is linked to an episode in the strike known as “The Virden Riot,” in which four Mt. Olive men (and still others from nearby towns) were killed in a shoot out with mine guards on October 10, 1898, as a train carrying 180 black strike-breakers recruited from the south, attempted to pass through a band of armed strikers, and reach safety within a fortified stockade at Virden.

Relationship to Route 66:
These farming and mining towns were on the 1930 to 1977 alignment of Route 66. The rural nature of these communities and landscape has changed little from the heyday of the highway. This is a direct connection to the historical ambience of traveling Route 66.