Zeigler has outlasted the industry that built it

ZEIGLER — This is the prototypical company town. Chicago industrialist Levi Zeigler Leiter and his son, Joseph, purchased 8,000 acres of land in western Franklin County in the early 1900s and immediately began work on sinking a mine to tap the region’s extensive coal reserves. That was the birth of the Zeigler Coal Company, along with the community, which was literally built to house workers.

Zeigler Coal has long closed its doors, and the coal industry in Southern Illinois is a shadow of what it was in its heyday, when dozens of mines dotted the countryside. But the community hangs on, though the storefronts are largely empty and the streets uncrowded.