IBEW Local 350 was chartered in Hannibal, Missouri on January 28, 1903. It joined a young brotherhood of electrical workers at a time when the country was being wired for the electrical age.
The Charter
Local 350's charter was recorded in The Electrical Worker's list of new locals, "Charters Granted in January," alongside towns from Bangor, Maine to Lansing, Michigan. Number 350 was Hannibal, Missouri.
The First Meeting Place & Officers
The union's directory of locals records where Hannibal's electrical workers first gathered. The listing reads: "No. 350, Hannibal, Mo. Meets second and fourth Monday at Trades Council Hall." The Trades Council Hall stood at the corner of Sixth Street and Broadway (600 Broadway) in downtown Hannibal. The same listing names Local 350's first officers: President L. M. Steadman, recording secretary M. R. Kennedy, and financial secretary J. C. Watts of 606 Rock Street.
Local 350's First Words in Print
In its first letter to The Electrical Worker, press secretary J. C. Watts reported on the work around Hannibal. The Bluff City Telephone Company was stringing some 6,000 feet of cable, and the local made sure the crews were union men.
The State of the Union, 1903
When Local 350 received its charter, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was barely a dozen years old, having been founded in St. Louis in 1891. The 1903 issues of The Electrical Worker read like dispatches from a movement finding its footing, with letters from locals in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Duluth, and even Manila. The trade was the cutting edge of its day: line work, inside wiring, telephone and telegraph, electric streetcars, and the new central-station light and power. It was dangerous, underpaid work, and the journal's pages are full of brothers laid up by falls from poles, crushed limbs, typhoid, and smallpox. Two causes ran through every issue: the eight-hour day and the union label.
The 1903 numbers also show a union maturing. Locals debated whether to move the convention from Salt Lake City to Indianapolis, weighed Socialist politics, and mounted a heartfelt campaign for an invalid and pension fund so that aged and disabled linemen would not face, as one editorial put it, "the poorhouse or a revolver." Other pages described early "current-proof safety suits" for live-wire men, jurisdiction fights with the gas fitters over conduit, and organizing drives reaching into Canada. By turns idealistic, fraternal, and militant, this was the brotherhood that Hannibal's electrical workers joined.
Hannibal & the Labor Movement, 1903
Local 350's charter came at a high-water moment for American labor. Nationally, 1903 followed close on the great 1902 anthracite coal strike. That same year, Hannibal-born Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, the daughter of Irish immigrants, helped found the National Women's Trade Union League with AFL backing.
Closer to home, Hannibal supported an active labor press, the Hannibal Labor Press, and the Atlas Portland Cement plant opened just south of the city. That plant gave rise to ILASCO, an immigrant workers' village later listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which drew Romanian, Slovak, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian, and Ukrainian laborers. It was in this climate of organizing and industrial growth that the electrical workers of Hannibal built Local 350.
Sources: The Electrical Worker (1903); State Historical Society of Missouri; National Register of Historic Places (ILASCO).