Christopher, IL & Coal Mining 1920

Christopher, IL, 1928

Josephine (Alaria) Riva died in northern Illinois in 1919 and by the following year her husband Giacomo/James Riva and their three children had moved to the southern part of the state. The 1920 U.S. Federal Census places them in Franklin County, Tyrone Township. More specifically, they moved to a house at 247 Snider Street in Christopher, Illinois. The C.B.& Q. Railroad and four large mining companies had recently transformed the village of Christopher into one of the nations' most productive coal regions.

My generation of Riva's probably all remembers our fathers, John and Peter, talk about their early years in Christopher. We heard stories about how the town was a "company town" with company stores and the mine owners kept people living on credit to stores when the mines were closed seasonally. When they were open, the miners would struggle to pay down their debt. The story goes that there was only one guarded road in and out of the town and no one could leave if you owed money to the company store. According to oral history, James Riva planed his "great escape" from Christopher by growing
potatoes for a store keeper he had befriended thus allowing him to build up a nest egg to send his oldest son north to work in a factory. That son, John D. Riva---so the story goes---was able to accumulate enough money up north to move the rest of the family out of the coal mining community up to Michigan.

Franklin County Miners, 1920

Years ago, Peter Riva gave a taped interview where he talked about his father, James Riva. This is what he said: "My dad worked in the coal mines a lot of years and he was stooped over quite a bit 'cause he worked in the mines where you had to be stooped over. In the mines my dad wore white pants. Figure that one out! They were special heavy canvas bib overalls. They were tough to wear, but besides that, they didn't want no color in them 'cause they'd get poisoned from the dye on the skin. They changed them overalls once a week."

Family folklore also says that James picked and loaded coal for eighty-two cents a ton, and he was almost buried in a cave-in. I've tried to match up cave-in accidents from 1890 through 1930 with the towns that James lived without much success---not all the cave-in accidents are documented on-line at this point in time. One of the worse coal mine accident in history, however, took place near-by where he worked in northern Illinois in 1909. 259 men and boys out of the 481 who worked in the mine died. There is an interesting article about that Cherry accident here. It gives a good description of what it was like to be down in the mines during that time frame.

Another mine accident happened in Christopher just three years before the Riva's moved there and 18 men were trapped in Old Ben. You can read the newspaper account here. There was a second mine accident that occurred in Christopher in the 1920s and that may have been the one our grandfather was involved in but other than the date, I've found no on-line mention of that accident.

Click to enlarge

One of the most interesting articles I've found that gives a good flavor of coal mining in the 1920s is about the Herrin Massacre. It was a time in history when The United Mine Workers was first organizing and striking and many times they came face-to-face with strike breakers hired by the companies. That bloody day of the Herrin Massacre many people were killed. There is no proof that our ancestor was involved in any of the sit-downs except a vague memory of a story I heard in my childhood about a mine owner who had a machine gun aimed at sit-down strikers who refused to go down in the mine. But James lived in the same county when and where the United Mine Workers were forming, so the bad working conditions and low wages reported in the Herrin article would have applied to him as well as those directly involved in the massacre. J. Riva ©2008

The Riva Family, circa 1920s
Maggie, James/Giacomo, John and Peter


Reference for the Census:
Year: 1920 State: Illinois County: Franklin ED: 43 Page No: 026
Reel No: T625-365 Division: Tyrone Township SD: 17 Sheet No: 37B; 226A
Incorporated Place: Snider Addition to Christopher Illinois (lined out) Ward: X Institution: X
Enumerated on: January 14th, 1920 by: Scott McGlasson
Transcribed by Delores Wolos for USGenWeb,
http://www.usgwcensus.org/. Copyright: 2006

1920 Federal Census Franklin County, Illinois (ED 43: File 9 of 34)

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