The Leadville Irish Miners’ Memorial committee will hold a ribbon cutting and celebration of completion on September 16th next.
The striking memorial was constructed in memory of over 1100 Irish Immigrants, many from West Cork who lie nearby in unmarked graves.
The Cemetery remembrance, high in the Rocky Mountains will include a reading of the names of those unfortunate immigrants and the formal unveiling of the memorial.
Details from www.irishnetworkco.com
It will be followed later at the Tabor Opera House by “From Cork to Colorado”, a Leadville Style Revue. A delegation from Allihies in West Cork where many of the immigrants began their journey will attend. Mother Jones will be there too!
Mother Jones was familiar with the Rockefeller mine holdings in Southern Colorado, having been jailed in the State on several occasions during the Colorado Mine Wars in 1914.
“From January on until the final brutal outrage- the burning of the tent colony in Ludlow- my ears wearied with the stories of brutality and suffering. My eyes ached with the misery I witnessed. My brain sickened with the knowledge of man’s inhumanity to man”
Update: September 2023
The official completion of the Leadville Irish Miners’ Memorial organised by the Irish Network Colorado took place on Saturday 16th September 2023 in front of several hundred people.
Dreamed of by Kathleen Fitzsimmons and the Colorado Irish Roots organisation, created by Terry Brennan, now christened as “Liam O’Sullivan”, and the brainchild of Dr Jim Walsh of the University of Colorado, who discovered the burial place in the local Leadville Evergreen Cemetery of over a thousand poor Irish emigrant miners and their families including many children, this wonderful monument, high in the Rocky Mountains is a beacon for the Irish diaspora and the labour movement. Leadville is the highest elevated city in the United States.
Speaking at the completion, Dr Walsh said,
“At Ludlow, the workers were killed by bullets and kerosene, here they died from poverty. For the Labor community, these graves are now sacred, the people who lie here struggled to form unions – this is the breadbasket of the Colorado labor movement”
Irish Ambassador to the US, Geraldine Byrne Nason, Honorary Irish Consul, Jim Lyons and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet as well as other dignitaries, including the Mayor of Leadville, Gregory Labbe also attended.
The Irish Government had made a substantial grant towards the completion of this landmark monument.
The ceremony was also attended by Tadhg O’Sullivan and representatives from Allihies in West Cork, from where many of the miners originally departed for Leadville.
