Biohazard Cleanup Near Cherry Historic District Cherry, IL

Cherry is a village in Bureau County that was founded as a coal mining town and named for James Cherry, the first superintendent of the St. Paul Coal Company.

The St. Paul Coal Company sank the Cherry Mine shaft in 1905, and the mine produced coal to fuel the locomotives of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad.

On November 13, 1909, Cherry was the site of the Cherry Mine disaster, a fire that killed 259 miners and remains the third-deadliest mine disaster in United States history.

The 1909 fire started when a car of hay for the mine's mules caught fire from the kerosene torches miners were using after the mine's electric lighting system failed.

Remarkably, 21 miners trapped underground survived for eight days in the sealed mine before rescuers reached them, while 12 of the dead were rescuers who perished trying to save others.

More than 80 percent of Cherry's miners in 1909 were first-generation immigrants, drawn from sixteen different nationalities.

The Cherry disaster pushed Illinois to pass its first Workmen's Compensation Law in 1911, along with stronger mine safety and rescue rules, and the United Mine Workers erected a memorial to the victims in the village that same year.

Cherry's population peaked at 1,265 in 1920 during the mining boom, before the Cherry Coal Company, the mine's last operator, closed it in 1935.

The 2020 census counted 435 people in Cherry, living in 208 households, within a village of just 0.51 square miles.

Cherry is part of the Ottawa Micropolitan Statistical Area and sits on Illinois Route 89 a few miles north of Interstate 80.