In the summer of 1920, a coal magnate stepped down from a railway car in Taylorville, Illinois, to attend the funeral of one of his superintendents. The man he had come to bury was Philip White — once a boy carried across the Atlantic with his family in 1889, delivered from one mining country to another, and risen in the intervening years to command the mines of an entire district. The story of how he got there, and of the woman and children he left behind, belongs to the heart of the White family's chapter in Illinois.
Philip White, Immigrant Child to Superintendent
Philip was born on 12 July 1879 at East Dean in Gloucestershire, England, in the ancient mining country of the Forest of Dean, where coal and iron had been drawn from the earth for centuries. His parents, Enoch White and Myrah Barnard, were of the mining stock native to that country, and coal was the trade Philip was born into. When the family crossed the ocean in 1889, Philip was ten — a child leaving behind the only land he had known for the prairie towns, company housing, and deep shaft mines that were making Illinois one of the great coal-producing states.
He took up the trade his father had carried over. Philip's whole working life belonged to the Peabody Coal Company, which he served long and faithfully. He rose to become division superintendent across Southern Illinois — the man responsible for the mines of an entire district — and at Taylorville he held charge of Peabody Mines Nos. 5, 8, and 28. He was reckoned one of the best-known mine superintendents in the state, a reputation earned in a demanding and dangerous industry where a superintendent's judgment could mean the difference between life and death for the men below ground. By the account passed down in the family, he was the boss of all the mines in the Taylorville area — a man who need not have gone underground himself, yet who did. At Taylorville he was also a member of the Masonic lodge, a fraternity that bound together many of the professional and working men of the Illinois coal towns.
Mary Ellen O'Connell
The woman Philip married came from different ground. Mary Ellen O'Connell was born in Illinois in 1883, the daughter of Dennis O'Connell, an Irish immigrant, and Sarah Palina Worley. Her father had crossed the Atlantic from Ireland and settled among the farming country of Macoupin County, where he and his wife worked as turnip farmers at Gillespie. Hers was a household shaped by the labor of the land rather than the labor of the pit — a world of hard work, close family ties, and modest means. By 1900, at seventeen, Mary Ellen was recorded as a single young woman in Cahokia, Macoupin County, living as a granddaughter in a kinsman's household; a decade later she was again in Gillespie, still within the orbit of the family's Macoupin County roots.
The Marriage and the Moving Household
Philip and Mary Ellen married, joining the English miner's son to the Irish farmer's daughter. By 1910 the couple were living at Gillespie, and together they raised six children: Lauren, Reba, Verna, Bonneva, Philip Conrad — known as "Connie" — and Marjorie Anne, the youngest.
Their movement across the coalfields traced the shape of Philip's rising career. From Gillespie in Macoupin County, the family moved southward, and by 1920 they were recorded at East Marion, in Williamson County, in the heart of southern Illinois's coal country. This was one of the most restless and combustible corners of the American Midwest — a region of low hills and hardwood timber known as "Little Egypt," where seam after seam of bituminous coal lay beneath the soil. The year the family was counted there fell at a moment of extraordinary tension in the southern Illinois coalfields: the postwar collapse in coal prices, wage disputes, and the bitter contest between operators and a militantly organized workforce that would soon make Williamson County nationally notorious for open warfare. It was a district that offered a workingman a wage and a household a footing, but demanded a great deal in return, and could take away a father in the space of a single shift. From Marion the family would later return north to the mines around Taylorville in Christian County.
The Fire at Mine No. 18
On the evening of 24 July 1920, a fire broke out in an old pair of panels in By-Products Coke Corporation's Mine No. 18 at West Frankfort, in Franklin County. It was nearly extinguished, but the fire extinguishers on hand were exhausted, and when the crews returned the fire had rekindled. The panels were then sealed off.
On 28 July, one seal was broken so that a crew wearing oxygen breathing apparatus might enter for inspection. Teams from Benton, Herrin, and DuQuoin, county and state inspectors, and the local and district management of the company were all present. The first inspection turned up smoke, and the county inspector, wearing a helmet, was overcome; he was carried out to the seal within half an hour and revived.
On the second inspection, Philip — the district superintendent, who was not supposed to go in at all — was likewise overcome. He went in to rescue a man who had already been felled by gas. He had been ill and had vomited, and the matter clogged the mica valves of his breathing apparatus, cutting off the flow of oxygen. He was brought back to the seal, but it took far longer than it had for the inspector, and he could not be revived. Three doctors were on hand when he was carried out. Philip White died at about noon on 28 July 1920, aged forty-one, leaving a widow and six children.
The official coal report set down the plain public record of a man overcome when his apparatus failed. The newspapers gave it the family's meaning: "In trying to save the life of the other man he was himself overcome and gave his life trying to save the other." As the story was remembered within the household, it was simpler still — he was not supposed to have gone into the mine at all, but he went in, and his mask failed, and he died underground.
The Funeral and the Promise
Philip was buried at Taylorville on the afternoon of 31 July 1920. His body arrived over the Wabash railroad at twenty-one minutes past two, and mine superintendents, clerical staff, and miners from across the state gathered at the company district office and marched to the depot to meet it. The Taylorville Masonic lodge conducted the graveside service. An extra express car of flowers travelled on the funeral train, with three more truckloads sent by Springfield florists. Martin Bolt, assistant director of the Illinois department of mines and minerals, attended for the state, and mourners came from Springfield, Chicago, and across Illinois. The newspaper headline named the day: "Mine Hero Is Paid Tribute."
Francis S. Peabody, the president of the Peabody Coal Company, travelled from St. Louis to attend the funeral. Standing with the widow at the graveside, he asked her where she wished to live. Her answer was a single word — "Here in Taylorville." Peabody's reply was extraordinary: "Pick out the house you want and send me the bill … and you will go on our payrolls as a mine superintendent. We will pay you this salary as long as you live and if you die before your children are educated we will pay it to them until they finish school."
The undertaking was carried out to the letter. On 20 September 1920, Peabody bought the former Ernest E. Stockon property at 925 West Main Cross Street in Taylorville and had it deeded to her — a big house, chosen, as she said, for a big family. She was placed on the company payroll as a mine superintendent, drawing her husband's full salary for the rest of her life. Beyond the salary and the house, the company undertook to pay for the children's college education should they wish to attend.
The Six Children
The six White children had all been born in Illinois between 1901 and 1918.
Lauren, the eldest, was born in 1901. On 20 September 1926, at age twenty-five, he was killed at Peabody Coal Company's No. 9 mine near Taylorville, where he worked as a trip rider, caught between a pit car and the coal rib. He left a widow and one child. In the space of six years, the mines had taken two men of the family — first the father, then his eldest son.
Reba, born in 1903 in Taylorville, married Clare Edward Flesher on 26 October 1924. She lived in Taylorville before moving to Houston, Texas, where she died in 1991. Verna, born in 1906, made her home in Taylorville and Springfield during her working years and died in Harris County, Texas, in 1981. Bonneva, born in 1911, married George Tanner on 12 July 1933 and spent her later years in Pana, Christian County, where she died in 1992. Philip Conrad — "Connie" — was born in 1916 and lived a peripatetic life across central Illinois, residing at Springfield, Normal, Taylorville, and Pana at various points before his death at Pana in 1978.
Marjorie Anne, the youngest, was born at East Marion on 19 October 1918. The Peabody promise reached her: she attended William Woods College in Missouri, not far from the University of Missouri, where she swam on the college team. In time she would marry Robert Darrel McWard at Taylorville, and her later life would carry her far from Illinois — but those chapters belong further on.
Mary Ellen's Long Widowhood
Mary Ellen made her home in Taylorville for the rest of her days, the big house on West Main Cross Street her anchor. She appears there in the residence records of 1926 and 1932 and in the census enumerations of 1930 and 1935. In 1940, aged fifty-eight and listed as widowed, she was recorded at Springfield, in Sangamon County, as the mother in a household — likely staying with one of her children — but she was still living at Taylorville in 1942 and 1944.
Loyalty to her own family ran deep. Her brother John O'Connell had gone down into the mines as a young man, and in his old age, retired and drinking heavily, he had come down in the world. Out of loyalty she took her hard-luck brother into her home. The arrangement had its limits: when he came home drunk, John slept on the back porch of his sister's house with only two blankets to his name — a small, telling image of the hardness that still shadowed the family even as Mary Ellen's own fortunes had risen.
Mary Ellen White lived out her final years in the town she had chosen more than three decades earlier. She died on 25 August 1955 at Taylorville, Christian County, Illinois, at the age of seventy-two, and was buried there that same year.