Amazon Army
In 1921, thousands of wives, daughters, mothers, sisters and sweethearts of striking coal miners in Southeast Kansas marched in protest against unfair labor practices in the local coal mines.
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Franklin’s Rich History
Franklin began as a mining community in the early 1900s. It is located just off Highway 69 Bypass which is a major corridor between Kansas City and Pittsburg, KS/Joplin, MO.
Read More →Mining & Immigration
Crawford County Kansas is known for its coal mining heritage and the settlement of many different ethnic groups who came to the United States in search of work in the coal fields.
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About Us
We are an exhibition located within the Franklin Community Center & Heritage Museum in Franklin, Kansas. The public is invited to visit and view the mining artifacts as well as other historic items.
701 S. Broadway
Franklin, KS 66735
(620) 347-4220
Hours of Operation:
Mon-Sat 10am-4pm
Please call to schedule tours.
Social
Visit Miners Hall Museum before this special exhibit closes. Several special events taking place. Follow us on Facebook so you won't miss them and please share with your friends. Daily stories are posted on our page which are currently in the Morning Sun. Be sure to pick up your copy or subscribe to be assured of receiving them all.Over three fiercely cold December days in 1921, thousands of southeast Kansas women marched in support of striking coal miners. On December 12, 2021, Linda O'Nelio Knoll will present "The March of Amazon Army" at the Miners Hall Museum in Franklin to commemorate the women's march on the site where it began exactly 100 years ago. Read more on the Kansas Stories blog: bit.ly/3rwTgOG #movementofideas #amazonarmy
Article appearing in today's (December 3, 2021) edition. Be sure to subscribe or pick up your copy today.![]()
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AMAZON ARMY CENTENNIAL![]()
1921 Fight for Justice in the Kansas Coalfields![]()
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Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a series on the centennial anniversary of the Amazon Army March of December 1921.![]()
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Women came in groups of 8 and 10 from Camps in Radley, Dunkirk, Frontenac, Arma, Croweburg and as far north as Mulberry and south Cherokee. When the day dawned Dec. 14 5:00 a.m. the crowd of women was miles long. No one had dropped out and as we left the Miners Union Hall in Franklin, hundreds more joined us behind the American flag. — Mary Skubitz ![]()
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When Joe Skubitz handed me his mother’s journal twenty-one years ago at his home in Wichita, I had already been collecting information on the women’s march for some thirteen years. Reading Mary’s journal entries, however, was a revelation — knowing that she and the thousands of women with her during those eventful three days could not have anticipated what lay in store for them. Especially so after learning three troops of Kansas National Guard Calvary were ordered down from Topeka to “Keep the peace” along with a request from the county sheriff for a deputized force of a thousand to deal with the emergency. ![]()
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Joe, a retired long-serving congressmen who was 93 at the time, beamed with pride some 80 years later, when interviewed about his mother’s involvement in the protest. In April 2000, when Army of Amazons was being performed along with the unveiling of the mural Solidarity by Wayne Wildcat, Joe brought his son Dan, a retired attorney, and his grandchildren, from Wichita to the Performing Arts Center in Girard to see the play. ![]()
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The house was packed with an audience of over 400. Afterward, Joe, who was visibly moved by the performance, as was his family, spoke to the crowd. Later that evening, I was to discover that Joe’s son and grandchildren had never heard this story and knew nothing about their grandmother and great-grandmother’s part in it before that night.![]()
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I came to realize that this was the norm as I interviewed those who had lived during those hard-scrabble mining, strike-ridden days. There was a recurring sense that, in difficult times, you did what you had to do and went on. Standing up against injustices became part of the fabric of their lives. ![]()
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In 2018, I received a call from the niece of Mary Youvan Skubitz who lived in Phoenix. She had discovered my website and wanted to know more about the march. Later that year, she traveled to southeast Kansas, and I interviewed her. I discovered that her family had spent summers here with the Youvans and she knew her Aunt Mary well, but she never heard Mary, or any other family, speak about this history. ![]()
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In 2019 a young woman from Colorado contacted me as she was putting together a family history to surprise her father. Andy Kennedy was not only to learn that she had relatives in southeast Kansas that she was not aware of, but also that her great-grandmother Elena Purgatorio had taken an active part in the march, was arrested, and reported to have said that she would do it again. ![]()
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Elena would lose her husband six months after the march, murdered at a party by opponents of the strike. In 1922, Elena moved to Chicago where she ran a large boarding house and raised her daughter, Pearl. Pearl would later become a teacher and celebrated educator working with children on Chicago’s southside. This history gave Andy a new understanding of her great-grandmother, born in 1891, who came from Umbria, Italy with her father and brother to mine coal. Elena died in 1981 at the age of 90. ![]()
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With her newly discovered Purgatorio relatives, Andy visited her great-grandfather’s grave, in Frontenac, which bears the inscription Elena created those many years ago which serves 100 years later as a testament to those times: “To our beloved husband and father, cowardly murdered during the miners’ strike of 1921- 22, for having loyally upheld the cause of justice.” ---Linda O’Nelio Knoll
Article appearing in today's (December 2, 2021) edition. Be sure to subscribe or pick up your copy today. ![]()
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AMAZON ARMY CENTENNIAL![]()
Union Maids & Rebel Dames![]()
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a series on the centennial anniversary of the Amazon Army March of December 1921. ![]()
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The phrase “A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done” aptly describes the life of a woman who during the first half of the twentieth century would find herself taking care of her family in a coal camp; life there was very, very hard. Things we take for granted – running water, electricity, refrigeration, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, central heat, washing machines, permanent press clothes, and cleaning products were rare or nonexistent during the early 1900s. Most women devoted up to three days each week just for washing and ironing, including washing the miners filthy black clothing “by hand” on a wash board along with the family’s laundry. Many made their own soap and starch. Bread, a staple, was homemade daily. A chicken dinner started not at the grocery store but with catching the chicken and killing it. ![]()
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Beyond the long hours of toil packing miners lunch pails at 4 a.m. to tending to children, gardening, cooking, milking a cow (if you were lucky enough to own one), the lives of these women were caught up in a world of shifts, strikes and underground disasters. Whistle blasts, like the tolling of monastery bells, announced the miners' work schedules and, in the event of a malfunction at the mine, tragedy. Four blasts indicated an accident or cave-in. Women had to be steadfast in their reserve to carry on despite the daily hazards and hardships, ultimately adding their voices to a group chorus protesting the labor struggles facing their men in an occupation that left little in the way of protection, safety, or security. Meet two such women, Marie Merciez and her daughter Clemence, marchers in the Amazon Army. ![]()
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Clemence Merciez DeGruson was born on Mar. 1, 1903, in Roseland, Kansas to French immigrants Jules and Marie Merciez. Jules was a coal miner. Marie Bezinque Merciez, born in France in 1873, had worked as a cook for a coal baron’s family in Africa before coming to America in 1881. When Camp 50 was established in 1915 by the Central Coal & Coke Company, Marie dismantled her independent grocery, which was built in direct opposition to the company store in Carona, and, with her husband, moved it board by board to the newly established coal camp, a distance of 25 miles. Clemence recalled, “Pa sawed it in half and horses dragged it on logs to the site where he had built a cellar and foundation, and we opened up the store there. For us to sleep, he built some rooms about fifty or sixty feet from the store. We would have to run through the snow to go to bed in the wintertime.” ![]()
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Clemence, who was 17 at the time, attended the first meeting of the women marchers at the Union Hall in Franklin on Dec. 11, 1921, with her mother. The plan was to march on the mines and barricade them from nonunion workers. The women were to sing and drum on pit buckets, throw red pepper into the eyes of anyone who tried to stop them, and join hands at the mines entrance. Marie volunteered to supply the red pepper from her store. (Black pepper when the red ran out.) ![]()
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65 years later, Clemence's son, Gene DeGruson, director of the Special Collections Library at Pittsburg State University — and nationally known scholar and poet — wrote of his mother's experience in a poem titled "Alien Women.” It lives on in his book “Goat’s House,” as a testament to her and all the women who once took a brave stand in history. — Linda O’Nelio Knoll![]()
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Alien Women ![]()
For Clemence Merciez DeGruson![]()
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In '21, my mother still herself ![]()
at seventeen marched for Alexander ![]()
Howat to bust the scabs who worked ![]()
the mines in place of the fathers ![]()
and husbands of the thousand women ![]()
who marched with her carrying ![]()
their men's pit buckets filled ![]()
with red pepper to throw in the eyes ![]()
of the poor scabs who cursed back in English to their Slovene, German, ![]()
French, and Italian over the State Militia's rifle fire. ![]()
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It's all dim in her mind now. She ![]()
remembers only that she was hungry![]()
and frightened. She does not remember ![]()
Judge Curran, who said, "It is a fact ![]()
that there are bolsheviki, communists, ![]()
and anarchists among the alien women ![]()
of this community. It was the lawlessness ![]()
of these women which made necessary ![]()
the stationing of the State Militia ![]()
in our county for two months ![]()
to preserve law and order." ![]()
She does not remember ![]()
they were called an Army of Amazons
Call for vintage aprons! For an upcoming exhibit, we are looking for vintage aprons, pictures of people wearing aprons, or stories about people who wear aprons. What industry do you know that uses an apron? We all know about early housewives wearing aprons almost all day. What about welders, bakers, butchers, storekeepers, blacksmiths, etc. Please private message us or call 620-249-9333 if you have an apron, photo, memory, or story that you’d be willing to loan for a 3-month exhibit.
Do you like fun projects? Do you have basic carpenter skills? We’ve got a small 2-3 hour project that we need help with. Our beautiful “outhouse” has been blown over by the wind. We need a simple base around the bottom (very simple and not a huge thing) then attach that to the concrete base. We can get help to lift the outhouse once the base is attached. If you or someone you know can help us with saving this wonderful local artifact we would appreciate it. Call Phyllis at 620-249-9333 or reply to this post.
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