Miners Hall Museum

Franklin began in the early 1900s as one of the coal camps of Crawford County, and its museum keeps the story of the miners who came to southeast Kansas from Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Britain and the lands that became Yugoslavia. The Kansas Historical Society says their mix of languages and traditions earned the coal field its name, the Little Balkans. Camps had names like 42 Camp, Blue Goose, Frogtown and Red Onion.

The best-known story here begins in 1920, when Governor Henry Allen created a Court of Industrial Relations to settle labor disputes and head off strikes. Alexander Howat, head of the Kansas miners' union, refused to recognize it and was jailed, and the national union replaced him. Miners loyal to Howat stayed out. Early on December 12, 1921, their wives, mothers, sisters and children, as many as 6,000 by the society's count, marched from camp to camp to shut the mines, carrying American flags and buckets of red pepper to throw at the men working in the strikers' place. The papers called them the Amazon Army. They marched for three days before the state sent in the National Guard. In the camps the women were heroes, and in 1925 the industrial court was disbanded after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

The museum opened in 2012. It is moving a Page 618 walking dragline, one of eighteen built, to the corner of US-69 and K-47 south of town for restoration.