Mining Coal in Kankakee County

This towering dragline crane strips off overburden, 30 cubic feet at a time, to expose the coal seam at a Peabody Coal Co. strip-mining site in northwestern Kankakee County.

By Jack Klasey

April 26, 2025

“If you do not stop misbehaving, Santa will leave just a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking!”

Readers of a certain age might find that admonition an echo from their childhood (unless, of course, they were always well-behaved).

Younger readers probably wonder why a chunk of black rock would be given as punishment for bad behavior. The tradition dates to the late19th century, when coal was the most common fuel for home heating; it was thus readily available (in the basement “coal bin”), inexpensive, and definitely not a desired gift.

In the late 1800s and much of the 1900s, coal was a widely available and highly valued resource. In addition to being relied upon for heating homes, schools, and businesses, coal was burned to generate electricity for household and street lighting, as well as manufacturing operations. It was also the primary fuel for transportation (railroad locomotives, riverboats, and ocean steamers).

For more than a century—from 1870 to 1973—the mining of coal was an active industry in northwestern Kankakee County and adjoining areas of Grundy, Will, and Livingston Counties. The first coal mine in Kankakee County was opened in 1870 near Clarke City, located two miles west of Essex. The Clarke City mine was at the eastern edge of what would become a coal production area that stretched from Wilmington in Will County on the north to Cardiff in Livingston County on the south, and westward into Grundy County around the towns of Diamond, Carbon Hill, and Coal City.

The early mining operations were “shaft” mines, which consisted of a vertical shaft dug to reach the narrow coal layer (“seam”) about 100 feet below the surface, and horizontal tunnels created as the coal was removed and sent to the surface. Typically, the coal seam was a horizontal layer approximately two feet thick. Much of the state of Illinois is underlaid by coal, but in most areas, the coal seam is too far below the surface to be mined economically.

Removing the coal was hard manual labor, performed by workers (many of them Italian immigrants) using picks and shovels. The broken coal was loaded into carts and moved down the tunnel to the vertical shaft, where it was hoisted to the surface for cleaning and processing. In the late 1890s, an estimated 4,000 miners were at work in the Kankakee/Grundy/Will/Livingston coal production area.

Coal mining was also a very dangerous occupation; accidents resulting in injuries and even death were common in the underground mines. The worst local mining disaster took place at the Diamond Mine between Braidwood and Coal City on February 16, 1883. Surface water from heavy rainstorms broke into the underground tunnels, flooding them and killing 74 miners.

Another fatal mining event took place in March, 1903, at Cardiff in Livingston County, some 16 miles south of Diamond, when a series of underground explosions killed nine miners and injured thirteen more. The mine was deemed a total loss and closed; a new mine opened later that year, and operated until 1912. When that mine closed, the village of Cardiff soon became a “ghost town” as hundreds of miners moved on to other communities.

Two Kankakee men, Irvin Powell and Fred Snow, saw an opportunity in the empty town of Cardiff. In August, 1913, they purchased 85 buildings and moved them to Kankakee, 23 miles to the northeast. A story in the Kankakee Daily Republican noted they would be “rebuilt into modern and up-to-date homes" in a new subdivision north of Soldier Creek and west of Fifth Avenue. The completed buildings were painted a uniform white color, giving that neighborhood a name still used by Kankakee old-timers: White City.

“Shaft” mining in Kankakee County died out as local coal mines closed in about 1910. Tracy and Oklahoma, two tiny mining towns located between Buckingham and Clarke City, became almost instant “ghost towns” as miners and their families moved on. Clarke City, with a population of nearly 1,000, died a slower death. By 1920, the town’s remaining buildings were occupied by 14 residents; by the mid-1960s, the population had dwindled to one—an elderly widow who had arrived in Clarke City as a bride in the 1890s.

After an absence of almost four decades, coal mining returned to Kankakee County in 1947, when the Northern Illinois Coal Corp. opened a mine near Essex. The new mine used a different technique, called “strip” mining, to reach and extract the coal. Instead of burrowing down to the coal seam and creating a maze of tunnels, strip mining employs huge excavating machines to remove the rock and soil (called “overburden”) above the coal seam. After the overburden is stripped away, the exposed layer of coal can be mined, using smaller power shovels and a fleet of diesel-powered dump trucks.

The stripping process follows the underground coal seam, with the excavating machines (known as “draglines”) removing overburden in 30-cubic yard “bites,” then swiveling to deposit the material in an adjoining area where coal had already been removed. Those deposits of excavated soil and stone, called “spoil banks,” are a distinctive feature of the strip-mining landscape. Between the spoil banks, a series of literally hundreds of lakes have formed, fed by natural springs and rainfall.

In 1950, the Northern Illinois Coal Corp. was acquired by the Peabody Coal Company of St. Louis, MO. Peabody would eventually become the major strip mine operator in the Kankakee/Grundy/Will area. By 1958, the St. Louis company would own 35,000 acres, with 3,098 of those acres located in Kankakee County. Coal production in the three counties during 1958 totaled 566,100 tons, with the largest output—353,265 tons—coming from Kankakee County. Will County mines produced 190, 087 tons, while Grundy produced 22,748 tons.

By the early 1970s, strip mining in the three-county area gradually came to a halt for economic reasons, including higher production costs and lower demand. Today, much of the former strip- mined land has been redeveloped for other purposes, especially recreational activities, such as fishing, swimming, and boating. A large area of former strip-mined land, (7,800 acres or slightly more than more than 12 square miles) was purchased from Peabody Coal Co. in early 1974 by Commonwealth Edison Co. to construct the Braidwood Nuclear Power Station. Four thousand acres, more than half the total property, was developed as the generating plant’s cooling lake.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.