The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six veterans of the Confederate Army. Ku Klux Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the KKK targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2013
In the fall of 1974, two unexplainable deaths and suspicious symptoms caused in another six patients at the Marion Memorial Hospital created a scare in Marion. Was there a serial killer working in the hospital? The details of the event are as follows. Continue reading
This post contains an article dated September 9, 1941 and notes a few details about Marion and the regions past. First is the potential sale of the Marion Waterworks. Secondly is the originally planned routing of Interstate 57 which was to avoid Marion altogether and swing through Centralia and Carbondale instead. Can you imagine how different Marion’s economy would be without the interstate being here? Third, the last part of this article deals with the paving of Boyton Street, which may seem inconsequential, but how would you get from Market to Court before it was there? Continue reading
National attention was attracted to Southern Illinois industrial development by an article in the October 26th, 1946, issue of Business Week entitled, ”Design for Living, Illinois Style”.
Accompanied by pictures of the Illinois Ordnance Plant, the article traced the history of Southern Illinois and outlined its plans for the future as follows: Continue reading
The development of long range bombers by the Russians in the mid 1930’s put the U.S. government War Department on alert to its defense weaknesses and caused a scramble to relocate key bases and arsenal stockpiles from vulnerable coastal positions to more secure inland positions. This put Marion into the light of possibility for the manufacture and storage of a planned Chemical Warfare Arsenal. The project was planned to cost $21,000,000 and occupy 80,000,000 acres of land for the purposes of building, testing and storing chemical warfare agents. Continue reading