Cherry, IL: Milwaukee Depot and Cherry Hill Mine Disaster

Depot: (Satellite, based on the aerial photo below.)

Mine: (Satellite, the trees to the northeast cover the mine dump.)

Matt Overstake posted a couple of photos with the comment: "Cherry, IL.".

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Jack Rooney posted
I am originally from Cherry, Illinois...site of great 1909 mine disaster. The Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul railroad established Cherry specifically to provide coal for their line. Here is a photo of the depot at Cherry.....kind of unique with those two doors at the end. Know that Olgesby, IL and Gratiot, WI also had same depot. Wondered if anyone has ever seen another somewhere?
Trenton Dominy: The depot location is now a modern day house.
David Hochstetter: Looks like a big station for such small town.
Jack Rooney: David Hochstetter True, I went to Gratiot just to see it....I paced it off and it was like 30 feet wide and 90 feet long. It was said that the thought was that Cherry would grow to be large.....but the coal industry went the other direction just ten years later. I don't remember the depot in Cherry. An old timer in Cherry told me when I was a kid something like "there isn't a house in Cherry that doesn't have a few boards from the depot in it."

Jack Rooney posted, rotated
C,M, St.P depot in my home town Cherry Illinois.   Unique style I think with those double doors.    Very large....approx 30' x 90'.   Saw photos of same style at Olgesby Illinois....no longer there and Graciot Wisconsin, still there. Anyone ever see this style anywhere else?
Richard Fiedler shared
Richard Fiedler shared

Sometimes procrastination pays off. I knew there was a bad mine disaster here. Chuck has done the research.

Chuck Edmonson posted thirteen images with the comment:

The shrill repeating whistle echoing across the chilly November countryside could mean only one thing to the folks near Cherry, Illinois some sort of disaster had struck at the Cherry Hill Mine.

 As family members from the company run-town rushed to the tipple above the shaft on Nov. 13, 1909 their thoughts were with the nearly 500 men; husbands, fathers, sons and brothers deep within the coal seams underground. The mine was run and operated by the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad to feed their hungry locomotives located in Bureau Co., northwest of LaSalle.

 Although the mine was equipped with the newest electrical lighting and ventilation system, a failure earlier in the week had the miners resorting to the old kerosene lanterns and torches for illumination.  A small fire in a coal tram filled with hay for the mules who pulled the tram cars, possibly from a kerosene lantern set in the wall had gone unnoticed for a while before miners made an attempt to move the car and fight the fire which only succeeded in spreading the fire. Ventilation fans were quickly turned on in an attempt to blow out the fire which only caused the fan house itself to catch flame as the hungry fire from a new oxygen source.

 As some 200 miners safely reached the surface, operators opted to close off the shafts to smother the fire which cut off the oxygen and allowed deadly carbon dioxide and nitrogen to build up in the seams below. Many were trapped some 500 feet underground cut off by the fire in the seam above. Some of the miners who escaped volunteered to go back down into the shaft in rescue efforts, some of then succumbing to the lethal fumes as well. After eight days 21 miners would be rescued, they had built a temporary wall to protect themselves from the deadly fumes and fire.

 Altogether, 259 men and boys, many of them recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and Italy would lose their lives making it the third worst US mining disaster. Some were found with hastily written notes on their bodies to loved ones as they faced their deaths.

 Today the nearby cemetery and memorials in the city are in the shadow of the slag piles that marked the location of the Cherry Hill Mine.

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1941 Aerial Photo from ILHAP