Marcus Charles Illions was born in 1865 in Lithuania and came to the United States at the age of seventeen with Frank C. Bostock, an impresario who brought his wild-animal show from England for a tour throughout the United States. Bostock hired Illions to carve the sides of wagons for the menagerie. When he completed this work, Illions remained in this country, and achieved renown as a master carver both in wood and in stone.
Illions is perhaps best known for his carousel carving. By 1892 he had his own workshop on Dean Street in Brooklyn where he carved horses and other decorative figures for Charles I.D. Looff's merry-go-rounds as well as for the "Bumgarz Steam Wagon and Carousele[sic] Works." Around the turn of the century he was hired by William F. Mangels to create the figures fo a merry-go-round Mangels had been contracted to repair at Coney Island. Illions moved his shop to Mangels's factory, where he worked for the next nine years on a variety of contracts. Illions's reputation continued to grow and his business expanded greatly; he hired many young apprentice carvers who carried on a wood-carving tradition well-established among Jews in Eastern Europe, although in a different setting and with a new design vocabulary. Some of these carvers, such as Solomon Stein, Harry Goldstein, and Charles Carmel, went on to become master carvers in their own right.
In 1909, Illions left the Mangels factory. Assisted by his four sons and various other family members, he established his own workshop on Ocean Parkway in Coney Island.
During the heyday of the carousel business at Coney Island in the early 1920s, there were at least ten Illions carousels in operation; although by the time Illions produced his last grand-scale carousel in 1927, the industry had gone into a marked decline. However, until his death in 1949, Illions continued to work as a carver. He refused to employ the mass-production techniques adopted by others, and continued to carve each figure by hand.
Barney Illions described his father's work as follows: "[He] used wood to create form that suggested flesh and movement, and animated it with his superb ability at carving both the realistic and impresiiionistic, so that the wooden figures seemed endowed with life."
Illions did not limit his work to the amusement industry. He also carved ornamental façades in wood and stone for public buildings and private residences in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and was even commissioned to undertake work for buildings on the Boston Commons. Illions also designed and carved religious ornaments for churches and synagogues.