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one of Sorento’s early businessmen. He and his wife, Anna, had eleven children including Mabel, Esther’s mother.
    The Johnson line of the family came to Sorento with the arrival of Esther’s great-grandfather Israel Johnson. A farmer and auctioneer, Israel was born around 1821 and traveled to Illinois by covered wagon from Tennessee. According to a census taker, in 1870, Israel Johnson owned a personal estate worth $1,000. Israel’s father, Jonathan Johnson, was a circuit-riding minister from Tennessee. In those days, the circuit riders traveled on horseback for weeks at a time withall of their earthly possessions packed into a saddlebag, going from provisional town to provisional town and makeshift church to makeshift church, taming both the wilderness and those lost souls that they passed along the way.
    At one time, Esther’s mother, Mabel, worked as a schoolteacher. Before his marriage, her father, Orla, worked in a retail store. However, like his father, Lawson, before him, Orla eventually became a coal miner and a farmer. It was difficult for most men of modest means not to go down into the mines. Cheap bituminous or soft coal was plentiful in Illinois, and by the mid-1800s it was in great demand. Until the onset of the Great Depression, coal output from Sorento soared.
    Orla, like many locals, ended up working at the Shoal Creek Company’s Panama Mine. First opened in 1906, the Panama was just five miles from Sorento. Orla worked alongside his brother Olis, their father, Lawson, and a man named John L. Lewis (who went on to serve as the president of the United Mine Workers of America for forty years, from 1920 to 1960).
    The Panama was a relatively small operation, used primarily to supply the Clover Leaf Railroad (built in 1881 along the south shore of the Great Lakes, connecting Buffalo, New York, and Chicago). The mine had a history of closing down for long periods, and so most of its workers supplemented their mining income with other work, mostly farming.
    By the time Esther’s father began working the mines, coal mining was already on a downward slide. The stock market crash in 1929 followed by the Great Depression ended the mining boom for good. Thousands of coal miners lost their jobs as mine after mine was shut down. In 1934, when Esther was fourteen years old, the Panama shut down permanently. Groups of miners and their families emptied out of Sorento as they went looking for livelihoods elsewhere.
    While the Johnson family remained in Sorento, they were not spared hardship. At one point, the family farmed out some of their children to live with relatives. Esther was sent for a time to live with her grandparents. Although it was meant to be a temporary measure, she ended up living with them until she finished high school.
    Although her parents were Catholics, while living with her grandparents, Esther regularly worshipped at the Free Methodist Church. A simple, whitewashed, wood plank frame structure with pine pews and a shingled bell tower, the church was located on the west side of north Main Street across from the railroad tracks. The church took its name from its break with the practice of charging for better seats in the pews closest to the pulpit (Free Methodists were also opposed to slavery). It was here that Esther’s own simple and principled beliefs were most likely formed.
    Whatever aspirations the Johnsons may have had for their eight children, the modest circumstances in which they found themselves certainly narrowed the possibilities. Yet despite the financial constraints that bore heavily on the family, they managed to place an emphasis on education. By all accounts, Esther was a gifted student; she possessed a sharp brain disguised by a shy demeanor. In her high school yearbook, the Sho-La-Hi , Esther is shown wearing a sensible, modest dress and thick eyeglasses that make her look much older than the demure teenager she was. During Esther’s three years at