SILVER CITY FACTS

Kris Murray, professor of music and humanities at Sauk Valley Community College, presented the following, garnered from personal interviews, as documentation and background on a project of great interest to local historians. Silver City was a community of homes made from converted railroad boxcars, back in the mid-1940s, and consisted mainly of steelworkers, their spouses and children; the men hired on to work at Northwestern Steel and Wire Company during the boom time following WWII.

1) Mr. Frank Aguillar's family lived in Boxcar #1. His mother ran a little store inside her house to help newcomers with their incidentals, e.g. soap, toothpaste and hair oil.

2) There were two Silver Cities! The first was built sometime in the early Spring of 1947, and was located at the end of Green Street which, on the East, dead ended at Avenue G next to where the Sterling side of the Avenue G Bridge is now located, and on the West, which dead ended at a gate that led onto mill property. On the other side of the gate there was a large field, filled with a huge sand pit (where children often played), and after that, along the banks of the Rock River, where the 24 inch mill still stands, was where the second Silver City was located.

3) The largest number of boxcars we were able to document in the first Silver City was between 100-110, not the two or three hundred that many people remember. A Sterling City Census taken in 1949, pretty much at the height of the Silver City experience, lists 102 boxcars and the names of each resident.

4) The boxcars in the first Silver City were not all metal or all wood as some recall, they were both. We have found pictures documenting some all wooden ones, some all metal ones, and some that have metal ends and wooden sides. What can not be disputed is that they were very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Many children recall waking up with icicles hanging off the bolt heads inside the cars.

5) The second Silver City came into being in 1953, when the land for the first one occupied was cleared to make way for the new 24 inch mill that was going to be built. Many, but not all, of the boxcars were picked up by railroad cranes and moved further west to a much smaller area which was located south of Highway 2, in the area close to Speedball Park, and pretty much sue south of where Willie's Restaurant and the Latin American Social Club are now located. Some residents actually went to sleep in one location and woke up in another, and several workers came home to find their boxcars missing and they had to ask friends what had happened to them.

6) It was not until the cars were moved to the second location that they were painted silver. This was done in order to reflect the sun's heat. Prior to this, they were all painted green. This was documented by several interviews and pictures, as well as by one of our informants, La Cerne Thompson, who worked for the mill in its Rock Falls machine fabrication plant. He spent two years, 1947-1949, putting windows and doors in all the boxcars in order to try and ventilate them, because, by all accounts, the heat in summer was almost unbearable.

7) Approximately 65% of the residents in Silver City were Hispanic, and although some came from migrant labor camps in Colorado, Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin and other places, the vast majority came from small backwater towns located in Texas's Rio Grande Valley. The perception that many of these people were undocumented workers from Mexico was also proven false by the research. Although most of them did not speak English very well, if at all, (which led to the inaccurate perception that they were undocumented workers) the overwhelming majority of Hispanic workers were second and third generation American citizens. After their first few years in Sterling, both the workers and their children quickly learned the language.

8) Prior to the arrival of the Silver City Hispanic residents, there were very, very few Hispanics in the Sterling, Rock Falls, Dixon area. Many people, particularly the youth, incorrectly perceived that since there are so many Hispanics here, that they have always been here. Our research documents that this is not the case, and that their numbers are so large because of Silver City. The Jessie Rodriguez family, now over 300 strong, traces its entire lineage to their grandparents who came here from Dana, Texas to live in Silver City and work at the mill!

9) Approximately 30% of the workers were Anglo's from Arkansas, southern Illinois, the Ozark Mountains, the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas, western Kentucky and Covington, Tennessee, a poor white suburb of Memphis. We were unable to document my early perception that large numbers of workers were southern Highlanders (Hillbillies) from Appalachia, or that Northwestern Steel actually sent buses to the mountain South with sign on their sides looking for workers. We did discover, however, that Frank Martinez apparently made many, many trips in a two ton truck to south Texas at the request of the mill to bring back workers. Also, we were surprised to learn that many families came to Sterling either on the Greyhound Bus or the train, which, at that time, provided passenger service.

10) Contrary to the rumor that there were many African Americans living in Silver City, we were only able to document two families that lived in the second location from 1953-1955. This information was provided by Billie Johnson, an African American woman whose brother was a local sports hero, and whose son was the first Black student elected student body President at Sterling High School. She was aware of only one other Black family that was living there at the time, but she was unable to remember the families name.