Mamie Bechstein, Educator of Yore

  When extolling the benefits of living in Mokena, one of the first points arrived at are the village’s schools. Known throughout Chicagoland for their sterling quality, Mokena is right to boast of our schools. For all of the laurels they’ve brought to our community, the schools never would’ve amounted to anything if wasn’t for those who taught in and oversaw them. One such individual whose name shines upon the record of our years is Mamie L. Bechstein, teacher and principal of the Mokena public school. 

  Maria Louise Bechstein’s life began outside Mokena on July 11^th, 1880, have likely first seen the light of day on her father’s farm, a wide, sprawling estate whose homestead stood at what is today’s intersection of LaPorte Road and Kirkstone Way. As she grew up, her friends and family all knew her as Mamie. Her roots in the community were well planted, as all four of her grandparents were German immigrants to the Mokena area in the days before the Civil War. Her mother was born Ida Schmuhl, and her father, Christian Bechstein, was a prominent citizen who would come to wear many hats in the Mokena of his day, including that of mayor of the village from 1896 to 1903, as well as being one of the founders of the Mokena State Bank in 1909.  

   As a young girl, Mamie Bechstein was educated at the Mokena public school, a brisk walk over country roads from her parents’ farm, the edifice having stood on the northwest corner of today’s Front Street and Schoolhouse Road, which would later take the name of the landmark. Built eight years before Mamie’s birth, the stately, two story wooden structure was considered one of the finest schools in all of Will County. During her time here as a pupil, Mamie’s teacher was Mary Jane Cunningham, who she’d later note with a touch of mischief and a hint of spice, that “we had words.”

   Around 1895, the Bechsteins moved to town, with her father still maintaining ownership over their farm’s buildings and acreage. At a time when few went to college, Mamie continued her studies at the Illinois State University at Normal, and graduated in June 1903. By the next year she was teaching in the small coal mining town of Minonk, in central Woodford County. At some point in this era, she returned home and began teaching at her alma mater, the Mokena school, and by 1907, was working in its primary department. 

Mamie Bechstein as a senior at Illinois State University, 1903. 

   In May 1910, Mamie Bechstein moved up the school’s ladder when the Board of Education hired her as principal to replace I.O. Sinclair, while receiving $90 a month for her duties. While she now had an important administrative position, she still stayed true to her roots and taught the combined fifth through eighth grades at the school, which was made up of 52 pupils in one room. In her words, she handled “the entire approach with no help.” There was no opportunity for high school education in Mokena in those days, so students would commute elsewhere for this level of schooling, at the time usually to Blue Island. 

   Mamie’s world as an educator in the grand old schoolhouse is one that would be totally unrecognizable to Mokenians of today. The school’s bell, perched high in its tower, played an integral role in the day. At 8:30am, a half hour before the start of the school day, Mamie would ring it around ten times with a thick rope that “took quite a jerk” to use. She’d also summon her pupils back to class with two or three rings after recesses at 10:30 and 3:30, and also to herald the end of the day at 4:00pm with three or four strokes.

   The entire building was heated by coal in her time, with the stoves’ fires in the school being started every morning by their janitor, which Mamie fed continually throughout the day from buckets. Each floor had one big classroom, in which the pupils sat in bench seats, coming to the front of the room when they were asked to recite an answer. Also at the front of each room was a platform upon which stood the teacher’s desk. 

This stately structure, which stood at the northwest corner of Front Street and Schoolhouse Road, served as the village’s school from 1872 to 1929. 

   In early December 1911, calamity befell Mamie when she contracted a debilitating illness, which one account describes as malaria, while another calls it typhoid-pneumonia. Being confined to her home in town, her class at school was cancelled until her younger sister Alice, herself a teacher, could fill in for her. Just before New Year’s, Mamie’s students showered her with Christmas post cards. Almost a year later, just before Christmas 1912, she resigned due to the untimely passing of her mother. 

   History hasn’t recorded if she continued to teach after she left the Mokena school, but it appears that she left the profession when she married Owen Miller of Iowa around 1919, it being common in those days for teachers to be single women. This union was graced by the arrival of a daughter, Edith Jane, around 1922. Over the years, Mamie and her family lived in various places around the country, such as San Diego, Cincinnati, and later Boulder, Colorado. She could rightfully claim many addresses over her long life, but she always considered Mokena her home, and so it was that her mortal remains were interred here at St. John’s Cemetery when she passed away at the venerable age of 101 in November 1981. 

   The Mokena schools of today serve as a living testament to the labors of Mamie Bechstein, and of those who came before and after her. While our Mokena is one that would be unrecognizable to her and her students, she was part of a long and time-honored tradition in our community.  

Lizzie Cappel: Pioneer Woman

   History is the story of normal people, and every Mokenian has a story. We are all reflections of the era in which we live, and one villager is a prime example of the robust resolve shown by the earliest residents of our community. To tap into the first days of Mokena, one has to know Lizzie Cappel.

   In order to understand Lizzie’s life, one has to first look to her parents, who were in the truest sense of the word, real pioneers. Johann Georg Storck und Henriette Sophia Boos were of hardy Hessian stock, hailing from a village called Wixhausen in south central Germany. The Storcks and their six-year-old daughter Margaretha were part of the great Germanic migration to America in the middle of the 19^th century, leaving their homeland in the 1852 and undertaking a grueling 42-day journey by ship across the Atlantic to New York. From their first part of call in the States, the Storcks then walked to Chicago, traveling again on foot from there across prairie and forests to Mokena, arriving here on June 22 of that year. 

   The Mokena that greeted the Storcks upon their arrival was one vastly different from today’s, the not-yet incorporated hamlet had then only first been laid out that year around the newly built Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, and was host to a railroad depot, a cluster of houses and the tiniest handful of businesses. Upon getting settled, the Storcks moved into a crude log cabin situated on today’s LaPorte Road. After a few years of hard work, Johann Georg Storck moved his family into another cabin in 1857, this one being just a short distance away and later standing for decades at what is today roughly the intersection of Wolf Road and Boyer Court. Their new, rustic log home was already old when the Storcks acquired it, and they would later tell friends and family that it had been built by the Potawatomi. 

   Johann Georg and Henriette Sophia Storck’s youngest daughter, Elisabeth Henriette, was born January 29^th, 1861 in the family’s cabin, not quite four months before the outbreak of the Civil War. As she was growing up, a few Potawatomi still lived in the area, and Lizzie, as she came to be known, always enjoyed a good back and forth with them. Years later, she’d remember that they would come to the Storck place from time to time looking for fresh vegetables, and were especially known to be fond of roasted pumpkins. 

   The Storcks were rugged prairie folk, and in Lizzie, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, as she only saw a doctor once in her life, who treated her for a bad case of diphtheria. Lizzie came of age at her family homestead just south of town, where the old log cabin would eventually be replaced by a modern frame house. She was active in her church, the German United Evangelical St. John’s Congregation, of which her family were founding members. Lizzie was also possessed of a caring nature, having tended to neighbor Thomas Sutton in his final illness before his passing in 1890. Throughout her life, she was known to use tried and true home remedies such as goose greases, Sulphur, molasses, and even red clover tea when treating those she loved. 

   Lizzie Stork was united in marriage with Mokena livestock buyer John Cappel, who due to his slight stature, was affectionately called “Shorty” by his friends. In August 17^th, 1896, the couple went to Joliet by horse and buggy to complete the ceremony, and as part of their celebration went to a circus in that place, where they won a stove for being the youngest married couple in the audience. This very stove would go on to see over 30 years of service in the Cappel house. 

   After their marriage, Lizzie and John made their home at the Storck place off Wolf Road where Lizzie had always lived, with her mother, Henriette, continuing to live with them. Their union was graced by two children, Carrie and Walter, who were born in 1897 and 1899, respectively. The Cappel children would grow up in Mokena, and were well known in the area, with Walter going on to work for the Rock Island railroad. 

   Lizzie Cappel knew her share of tragedy and hardship in life. She lost her daughter Carrie unexpectedly in 1933, within a few years of which she and John moved into her house at Wolf Road and Second Street. To compound this calamity, John Cappel passed after a tragic car accident outside town in 1942. 

Lizzie Cappel is seen in this 1945 image with her German language family bible. 

   Immediately after the end of World War II in 1945, Norma Lee Browning, a staff person of the Chicago Tribune, came to Mokena to write a booklet on the idyllic community. In looking for representative citizens to interview, those unique personages that could only be found in our village, Browning was steered toward Lizzie. The Chicagoan was received by the 84-year-old in a blue polka dot dress and a red ribbon in her hair, and wrote that she was “typical of the sturdiness and independence of spirit that characterize Mokena and its people.” Also of note to Browning was the fact that Lizzie had never seen a movie in her life. 

   Lizzie Cappel passed at her home in the village on July 8^th, 1946. She found her final resting place in St. John’s Cemetery in her family plot, just south of where so many of the scenes of her life played out. The erstwhile Mokena newspaper, The News-Bulletin, rued her loss as “one of the last pioneers of this section.” There was no other Mokenian like her, and Lizzie Cappel earned her place in our community’s history. 

Carmen Smallwood: In Memoriam

   Last Tuesday, April 28^th, Mokena rued the loss of Carmen Smallwood, one of the village’s truest residents. While Carmen was originally a native of Wayne County in downstate's Little Egypt, she later made Mokena her home in the latter part of the 1960s after having attended Southern Illinois University, where she received a degree in elementary education. 

   Carmen taught countless Mokenians over the decades as a teacher in the village, and was also active in the venerable Mokena Women’s Club, having led the group as its president for many years, while also being a key member of the Mokena Historical Society. 

   My interest in our community’s history, the passion which drives my life, grew and flourished during my work with Carmen restoring the historic Denny Cemetery on Wolf Road, also known as Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. She spearheaded the efforts by the Mokena Women’s Club to bring glory back to those forlorn, hallowed grounds starting around 1997. As a history-enthused seventh grader who only knew history as it existed in such far off places as Gettysburg and Valley Forge, the happenings at the graveyard held my rapt attention. Before long a sign was put up that asked for volunteers to help the Women’s Club in their work, listing Carmen’s home phone number as the starting point. I called it one day in the summer of 1998, and spoke to her for the first time, when she invited me to come with her and a few others to the cemetery to probe the ground with long metal rods, looking for forgotten graves. 

   Within a few days, I was with her in the cemetery, and on my very first outing, we discovered the base of a decades-long forgotten gravestone, and from then on, I was hooked. Many were the days I spent with her repairing broken markers, planting flowers, and simply talking about the Mokena of yore. These were the days when my interest in our community’s past was being awoken, and Carmen was a huge part of that. 

  Carmen Smallwood’s good deeds to the village were many, and as she did them, she never searched for a spotlight, or drew attention to herself. Her many improvements to our community were done silently, without ulterior motives. She will not be forgotten.