Miners Hall Museum sits on the exact ground where the 1921 Amazon Army march began. Soon it will also be home to the largest walking dragline preserved for public display in the United States, one of only two machines of its kind left anywhere on earth. Free to enter, it holds thousands of coal-mining artifacts and the stories of the immigrant families — Italian, Slovenian, Welsh, French, German, and more — who built Southeast Kansas.
Official Location Name: Miners Hall Museum
Website: minershallmuseum.com
Social Media: Facebook · Pinterest · YouTube
Street Address: 701 S. Broadway, Franklin, KS 66735
Phone Number: 620-347-4220
Email Address: minershallmuseum@gmail.com
Ground Zero for a National Headline
On December 11, 1921, roughly 500 women gathered at the Union Hall that once stood on this exact site. The next morning, between 2,000 and 6,000 wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of striking coal miners marched out to shut down mines across Crawford County. Newspapers as far away as the New York Times dubbed them the Amazon Army, and the Kansas governor called out the National Guard in response. No other museum in the country sits on the actual ground where that march started. Miners Hall Museum does.
Soon: America’s Largest Preserved Walking Dragline
Only eighteen Page 618 Walking Draglines were ever built, and only two survive today. One sits abandoned in a stretch of eastern woodland; the other, a 250-ton machine with a 100-foot boom, was donated to Miners Hall Museum by the Wilkinson family and is now being restored and moved to a new roadside park five blocks south of the museum. When the move is finished, it will be the largest walking dragline preserved for public display anywhere in the United States — a piece of machinery no other museum can carry, because no other museum owns one of the two that still exist.
A Living Historian, Not Just a Guide
Board member and historian Linda O’Nelio Knoll has researched the Amazon Army since 1986, and she is the granddaughter of one of the women who marched. Visitors don’t hear the story secondhand from a hired interpreter; they hear it from someone with a direct family line to the event — a connection no competitor can put on staff.
Rebuilt by the Town It Serves
An F4 tornado tore through Franklin on May 4, 2003, destroying roughly a third of the town’s homes along with its original community hall and post office. With volunteer labor and pro bono legal work from a local attorney, the town rebuilt its community center, and Miners Hall Museum opened inside it in 2012. The museum isn’t a separate attraction dropped into Franklin; it’s a piece of the town’s own recovery.
The Longest Sidewalk Connecting Two Towns
Alongside the museum grounds runs the Franklin-Arma Sidewalk, a 1.7-mile stretch built in 1936 and listed on the State and National Historic Registers. Museum staff describe it as the longest sidewalk built specifically to connect two separate communities. Visitors are encouraged to walk it, following the same route immigrant schoolchildren once used to get safely to class.
A Nationally Chosen Smithsonian Site
In 2011, before its doors even opened, the museum’s founding foundation was chosen as one of just six sites in Kansas to host the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibit The Way We Worked. During its six-week run in 2013, it drew more than 5,000 visitors from 38 states and five foreign countries — a preview of the pull this small-town museum has always had.
Free, and Different Every Season
There is no admission charge, and the museum changes its exhibits quarterly and adds new programs monthly, so a repeat visit six months later is a different visit altogether. A research center on-site holds ancestry records, coal-camp histories, and labor documents open to the public, giving descendants of Southeast Kansas miners a free place to dig into their own family’s story.
Who Finds Their Way Here
Visitors range from highway travelers pulling off US-69 to stretch their legs, to genealogists tracing a great-grandfather’s coal camp, to heavy-equipment enthusiasts who came specifically to watch the Page 618 dragline move down the highway in sections. School groups borrow the museum’s traveling history trunk before they ever set foot in the building.
Right on the Jefferson Highway
Miners Hall Museum also serves as a Tourist Center for the historic Jefferson Highway, the old auto route that once ran from Winnipeg to New Orleans and now overlaps with US-69 through Franklin. Travelers already driving this corridor, or the parallel Frontier Military Historic Byway, pass directly by the door.
Nearby
- Franklin Community Park — adjacent, owned and managed by the museum itself
- Frontenac, KS — a few minutes south, an Italian-heritage mining town home to the Harley-Davidson Technical Training Facility
- Pittsburg, KS — about 10 minutes south, home to Pittsburg State University, Crawford County Historical Museum, and The Balkan coffee shop
- Big Brutus — roughly 25 minutes southwest in West Mineral, a giant electric shovel preserved as a museum
- Fort Scott National Historic Site — about 30 minutes north
Reviews
On Facebook, the museum’s page has drawn over 2,700 followers and hundreds of “were here” check-ins, with recent posts closely following the community’s excitement around the Page 618 dragline’s move to its new home.
On Google, Miners Hall Museum holds a 4.8-star rating across 62 reviews. Visitors frequently mention how informative and friendly the staff are, several calling it a great stop to stretch their legs while driving between Joplin and Kansas City, and multiple reviewers point out the free scavenger hunt available on-site.
On TripAdvisor, the museum ranks #1 of 3 attractions listed in Franklin. Reviewers describe the guides as knowledgeable and genuinely enthusiastic about their own community’s history, and several mention pairing their stop with a trip to see Big Brutus, the giant shovel about 25 minutes southwest.