"Our Silence Will Be More Powerful Than Words Could Be": The Haymarket Martyrs Monument and Commemorative Authority

Summary

Forest Home Cemetery is the final resting place for a large cross-section of Chicago’s population. Not far from its entrance lies the cemetery’s most visited section: the burials of seven of the eight men tried and convicted for their involvement in the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing. Dominated by a monument to the Haymarket "martyrs" and an adjoining "Radical Row"—internments of over 60 labor activists and anarchists including Emma Goldman—the site is held in trust by the Illinois Labor History Society. Labor groups and anarchists regularly visit the site, with the later of routinely modifying the monument. These parties’ competing claims to interpretative and commemorative authority of the site reflect a larger contested landscape within the city. 2016 archaeological fieldwork at the site attempted to locate a 1892 time capsule placed alongside the Haymarket burials, while entering another claim to the landscape and interpretive authority: urban archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• CONSTRUCTING THE PAST: An examination of manipulated historical landscapes at historic sites.   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 162