"United We Stand: Irish Heritage" - Joliet, IL - Irish-American Historic Places on Waymarking.com

Long Description:
In the heart of downtown Joliet, visitors can find this mural celebrating the hard work and sacrifies Irish immigants endured to help make Joliet grow.

The information plaque reads:

United We Stand: Irish Heritage

This mural honors Joliet’s deeply rooted Irish Heritage. It uses a montage-like sequence and realistically rendered details to illustrate, in several key scenes, how Irish men and women have contributed to the history and character of Will County since the 1930’s. Women are shown toiling in a potato field, superimposed over a ribbon of the country’s orange, white, and green flag. The flag’s colors form the dominant palette of the entire artwork.

Even before fleeing the Great Potato Famine of 1846-47, many Irishmen found work digging the Illinois and Michigan Canal, completed in 1848, and in the local limestone quarries. These industries, pictured here, spurred the early growth and development of Joliet. The majority of canal workers were Irish, who toils long, hard hours at low pay and in dangerous working conditions. They lived in crowded, unsanitary shantytowns, and many died of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever.

The mural’s dramatic centerpiece pays homage to the major role that local Irish played in organizing labor unions and in fighting for workers’ rights. In 1876, Irish-Americans helped found the Chicago Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor of America, the nation’s most dominate labor organization of the 19th century. In Joliet the Knights represented steel and stone quarry workers. Following the Haymarket Affair and defeat of the packinghouse workers strike in 1886, the Knights’ influence and prestige rapidly declined, soon to be supplanted by an organization which would become the American Federation of Labor.

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