Unsung Hero: The Story of John Van Horn

 If you’re an old reader of mine, you’ll know that not only do I take a personal interest in the history of Mokena, but that I also have a special place in my heart for the unique personages of our town. My mind revels in the stories of those from our community who have set themselves apart from the rest, and especially those who have marched to the beat of their own drummer. Figures like these enhance life in our community. On this note, it is this writer’s pleasure to introduce John Van Horn, a well-known figure in the annals of Mokena’s past, and a man with a poignant story.  

   He first saw the light of day on September 16^th, 1825, at a place called Fundy in central New York. John could count among his cousins William Cornelius Van Horne, who, aside from spelling his surname slightly different than our Van Horn, would go on to be honorarily knighted by Queen Victoria for his services in building Canada’s first coast-to-coast railroad. The early history of Frankfort Township cannot be writ without this family, as patriarch Mathew Van Horn broke the virgin soil here as early as 1832, counting the John McGovney clan of Ohio as some of his very few neighbors. 

 

   History has long since erased how exactly young John Van Horn fit into this larger family, but he arrived in our neighborhood around 1836 as an eleven-year-old, and was later noted to have lived in a rustic pioneer’s log cabin with his parents close to where Frankfort would later sprout up.  He spent his youth on the untamed prairie, and as one who knew him would later state, “devoted his time and energies to agricultural pursuits.”

 

   By 1860, John was living with his mother and stepfather near Mokena, which at the time was a young hamlet along the Rock Island railroad. Not long thereafter, he struck out on his own and found work as a farmhand not far from Manteno in northern Kankakee County. Like countless others of his generation, John Van Horn found himself in the center of the storm in the vicious debate over slavery, and four months after the Civil War finally broke out in April 1861, he volunteered for service in Abraham Lincoln’s army. At a time when the average Northern soldier was about 25, 36-year-old John generously rounded down his age by 11 years upon enlistment. Shouldering a rifled musket with the 88^th Illinois Infantry, he first heard the whine of shot and shell at the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky in the fall of 1862. Less than a month later, however, his military service came to an abrupt end, when he was sent home on account of a long-forgotten disability.

 

The Civil War Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, where Mokenian John Van Horn first saw combat in the fall of 1862.

   After shedding his blue uniform, he spent time in his Illinois home, but before long the ex-soldier made up his mind to head back to New York, the place of his birth, to look up his brother Yates. Despite his first stint in the Union army having ended prematurely, John’s desire to quash the traitorous uprising of the slave holders knew no bounds, and he re-joined the army in April 1864, this time falling in with troops from the Empire State in the 115^th New York Volunteer Infantry. Once again, John Van Horn saw hard fighting, this time in the tangled underbrush of the Wilderness, the bloodbath at Cold Harbor, and the brutal siege of Petersburg, all in the state of Virginia. A contemporary would later say that Van Horn “didn’t know what fear was.”

 

   Years later, it would be said that he was wounded in action, although under scrutiny, no documentation of this can be found. Private Van Horn did however suffer an injury during the war that plagued him for life. As he would later put it, lugging backbreaking crates of hardtack in Virginia gave him a hernia that would eventually grow to the size of a goose egg, requiring him to wear a truss in later years. His service to the Union complete, John Van Horn was discharged from the army in June 1865, this time for good. 

 

   After the war, he stayed in New York for a spell and found work in the lumber camps of the Great North Woods. In the fall of 1865, John tied the knot with Nancy Miller, who was eight years his junior, in Herkimer County. All roads led back to Illinois, and in 1871, the year of the Chicago Fire, the Van Horns came back to Mokena, where they made their home for the rest of their days. The historical record doesn’t indicate that John had any kind of steady profession after the Civil War, but he was known to work in town as a laborer, and also came to be partially supported by a meager veteran’s pension from the federal government. Opportunities for John and Nancy Van Horn may have been limited in their day, as neither one could read or write.

 

   The Van Horns settled into a domicile on Cross Street, that was described as being a “quaint cottage”, a one-story structure “roofed with heavy sheet iron.” John proudly referred to it as his “shanty”, behind which was a little vegetable patch that would matter-of-factly be referred to as the best kept garden in Mokena. “There is not a weed to be seen along the well-cultivated rows of sweet corn, and blossoming potatoes, and carefully-staked peas”, said one who saw it firsthand.

 

  As they got older, Nancy became more or less crippled with rheumatism. As such, John did all the duties of the household for his “Mother”, as he affectionately called Nancy. The old soldier was a doting husband, seeing to his wife’s every need in her disability, doing all the cooking, baking, and dish washing. He was known to even personally cut and feed dinner to Nancy, such was her ailment that even holding a knife or fork was too difficult. One who gained access to the domestic life of the Van Horns noted that dessert usually was cool beer, and being the rugged folk they were, that was usually washed down with a “swig of Bourbon or sour mash.”

 

   One long-time Mokenian remembered years later that “Johnny Van Horn liked his liquid refreshments, especially when free.” In Van Horn’s day, Front Street saloon keepers dispensed their wares out of big wooden barrels, and when done with the barrels, would leave them in front of their establishments. The veteran would make his rounds of our town’s main street, starting at one end, and working his way down, emptying the last drops out of every keg he encountered. The resident recalled that by the time he was finished with his last barrel, the veteran “was ready for a nap.”

 

   The same Mokenian recalled a time when, in the middle of winter, one of his townsmen said something to Van Horn that didn’t sit right with him. In response, he ambled into the barroom where the naysayer sat with some other men, all gathered around a small stove fighting off the day’s chill. John was wearing thick mittens that day, and showing that he had the last word, he picked up the hot stove and walked out the door with it. Ultimately, “everyone laughed, including Johnny” and there were no hard feelings. 

 

  John Van Horn ran afoul of the village’s laws at least once, in another event that was probably fueled by alcohol. On September 6^th, 1884, he was hauled in for using “loud and boisterous language, and disturbing the peace” when it appears that he had gotten mixed into a fracas involving two other men. The incident won him a fine of three dollars, or about eighty-five dollars in today’s money.

 

   The pain of this alcohol use hung over John Van Horn like a specter; it reached its apex at the turn of the twentieth century, when a meddling neighbor of his tipped the scales for the 75-year-old. The neighbor in question was fellow Cross Street resident Horace E. Clark, a piano tuner who had married into the McGovney family. History hasn’t left us modern day townfolk too many details in regard to what exactly rankled Clark’s delicate sensibilities, but he was known to spy on the Van Horns through a hole in the fence that separated their houses, and whatever he saw, scandalized him. Descriptions would be rife of “sprees” and accusations hurled that the Van Horns “get drunk and disport themselves in a shameful manner.”

On the right, a modern day view of the former home of Horace Clark on the northwest corner of Cross and Division Streets. The Van Horn home formerly stood to the left.

   Horace Clark’s complaints would eventually be heard by county authorities, and John Van Horn was officially charged with being a “vagabond”, the legal paperwork also windily declaring him to be a “dissolute person, a common drunkard, railer, and brawler, and a lewd, wanton and lascivious person in speech and behavior.” His cousin Kate McGovney kindly furnished his bail, allowing Van Horn to return to the village for the time being. 

 

   Mokena was agog over the charges leveled against John Van Horn. It was said that the population was divided into two camps, those who easily supported the claims, and those who took pity on the old man and outright rejected them. Neighbor Clark had the support of a good number of his church, while on the other hand, the flock of one of the other Mokena churches, long since lost which one, considered themselves sympathizers of the aged veteran. The involvement of the churches in this affair is an interesting sidenote, and plainly illustrates their importance in the small-town life of Mokena in this day. Nothing in the dusty pages of history indicates that John was a church-going man, nor that he had anything to do with one congregation or another. 

 

   The case was set to be tried in the summer of 1900 in the common law court of Will County Judge Albert O. Marshall, a native of New Lenox. Many Mokena residents had been subpoenaed to appear as witnesses for one side or the other, and it was leaked that even Noble Jones, a former village mayor, would be among them. 

 

   A reporter from the Inter Ocean, a city paper with wide circulation through what we now call Chicagoland, got wind of the story brewing in our country town and took special interest in it. With no small curiosity, the publication noted that Will County’s Civil War veterans had taken the case keenly to heart. John Van Horn’s fellow “Boys in Blue” pledged to be on hand at the trial to show their support to their comrade, and to personally see to it that he would “not (be) disgraced now, at a time when one foot has already slipped over the brink of the grave.” 

 

   With all the media attention and local hubbub that the Van Horn case churned up, it is now completely unknown how it ultimately played out. All further coverage of the trial is conspicuously absent from local newspapers, and the archive of the Will County Circuit Clerk is devoid of records on the trial. Therefore, we are left holding our breath, not knowing if John Van Horn was found guilty of the charges that were brought upon him. 

 

   The old warrior breathed his last on January 17^th, 1909, and his earthly remains were buried outside Mokena under the sod in a peaceful corner of Marshall Cemetery. Even though Nancy Van Horn continued to draw a widow’s pension for her husband’s true service to the Union during the war, it wasn’t enough to live off of, and furthermore, without John’s care, she couldn’t live on her own. She had to move from the village to the state-run Soldiers’ Widows’ Home in Wilmington, where she ultimately passed away on January 24^th, 1912. 

 

   A little over a year after he died, a government-issued marker was erected over the grave of John Van Horn. It had arrived in the cemetery thanks to the efforts of Bill Semmler, a Mokena reporter who pulled the right strings to make sure that a fitting monument adorned the place. Nowadays weather beaten and covered with lichen, the stone proudly states John’s service, standing sentinel over the earthen mound that bears his bones. 

 

The grave of John Van Horn in Marshall Cemetery. (image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)

   In one breath, it might be easy to call John Van Horn a hard-drinking troublemaker, one of rugged individualism, or to dismissively brush him off as the village drunk. With another deeper, and probably more empathic look, one must wonder if his years-long struggle with alcohol was the result of the carnage he lived through as a battle tested Civil War veteran. With a hindsight of more than a century, it’s not too difficult to realize that John and Nancy Van Horn could have been the victims of malicious gossip on the part of their busybody neighbor; the bane of small-town existence. For someone who put his life on the line during this country’s greatest crisis, it’s time that John Van Horn’s reputation be rehabilitated, and he be recognized for the hero that he was. 

Mokena's Oldest Sidewalk?

   Pictured below is what is likely Mokena’s oldest length of sidewalk, built on Union Street around 1910 by Julius Gustav Oswald. A lifelong native of the village, Oswald was a manufacturer of all things concrete and was responsible for the installation of the majority of hard sidewalks in town in the early part of the 20^th century. 

J.G. Oswald's maker stamp in what is likely Mokena's oldest length of sidewalk on Union Street. 

Located on the east side of Union Street headed north from Second Street, this is likely Mokena's oldest sidewalk. 

Wanted: Indiana Billy

 Who doesn’t enjoy a hair-raising story of true crime? From bank robberies to safe crackings and horse thievery to street brawls, Mokena has seen them all. These dot our collective village timeline, providing for some proverbial spice to otherwise uneventful periods in history. It might not be so easy to believe, but our idyllic community has been the stage for quite a few violations of the law over the years, and when we turn back the pages to the year 1903, one will find that none other than the elusive Indiana Billy, a feared criminal of yesteryear, was in our midst. 

 

   The Mokena of the earliest years of the 20^th century was pretty sleepy place, even by the standards of rural farm towns. The reasons for this were many, primarily that trade and commerce that would have normally came to our community had been diverted to the newer trading points of Alpine, Marley and Orland due to the construction of the Wabash Railroad about twenty years earlier. A dearth of good roads in the area also wasn’t exactly auspicious for Mokena. These factors plus a severe countrywide economic depression in the 1890s led the town to experience such a drain of citizens, that by 1900, a federal census taker logged a mere 281 souls living within the corporate limits. 

 

   Thus, the scene was set for treachery. Under the cover of inky darkness one night in July 1903, a daring criminal act was committed when Mrs. Harry Miller’s village home was burglarized. The historical record isn’t clear as to whether or not Mrs. Miller was there when the thief struck, but he managed to make off with some valuables, including silverware, and about $12 in cash, or roughly $345 in today’s money.  

 

   As the small town reeled from the burglary, another drama was unfolding. Officer Oscar J. Klose had been Mokena’s sole peace officer for two years, and was used to run of the mill escapades in town, usually of the kind fueled by alcohol. What would happen on July 14^th would prove to be a little different. As he patrolled the village that morning, it was the general consensus of the town folk that the perpetrator of the burglary at Mrs. Miller’s was likely to still be lurking the community, and the constable kept a sharp lookout. With this in mind, Officer Klose spotted a suspicious character making his way up the Rock Island railroad tracks across from the Hacker lumberyard on McGovney Street. As Klose made his way over to the figure to see who he was, the stranger took off on foot. 

The Hacker Lumberyard, across from which Indiana Billy was captured, seen in its later iteration as the Mall Lumber Company. These buildings stood on the site of today's 11125 and 11131 McGovney Street.

 

   He wasn’t fast enough for Oscar Klose, who caught up with him in no time. In a dramatic escalation, the man then drew a revolver and attempted to shoot Klose. After an exhaustive tussle, the Mokena lawman subdued the would-be shooter, and with the help of general store keeper John A. Hatch, was finally able to handcuff the man and take him prisoner. Before a hearing with the town magistrate, the miscreant was drawn into a village building to be searched, and was quickly determined to not be the Miller burglar, as he had no cash on his person. However, what was found raised more than a few eyebrows, namely some fake keys and a bottle of nitroglycerine, all tools of a professional safe cracker. 

   The frisk very nearly had a completely different ending. When questioned more closely about the bottle, the stranger fibbed and said it was full of liniment for his leg. It was then thrown with a dismissive toss onto a bed, nearly resulting in a calamitous explosion of the agitated nitroglycerine. In a statement to the Joliet Weekly News a few days later, the man readily admitted that he “was trembling in his boots for a moment.” He went on to say that “I couldn’t open my mouth quick enough to stop him and I thought we would both be blown into eternity.”

 

   Officer Klose didn’t know it just yet, but he had just snagged an elusive criminal, the loathsome William Warren, otherwise known as Indiana Billy. It would turn out that he was wanted for a daring robbery in Missouri, and one local newspaper proclaimed that he was “one of the most expert safe blowers in the country.” Indiana Billy was sent to Joliet, where he stood before the grand jury, who slapped him with a charge of having burglary tools in his possession, and also sent him to stay in the Will County jail for seventy days on one count of vagrancy. 

 

   The saga was not yet over for the hardened criminal, who in early October of the same year got a new charge of assault with a deadly weapon, harkening back to his confrontation with Officer Klose in Mokena. Klose testified as a witness in the proceedings, as did the venerable John A. Hatch, the town storekeeper who helped the officer wrangle Indiana Billy the day of the incident; Mary and Ida Kiniry, mother-daughter residents of McGovney Street attested too.  For this charge, Indiana Billy was given a fine of $50 and court costs, but he couldn’t settle the fine, so he was carted back off to the county jail. His increasing familiarity with the jail in Joliet led the Lockport Phoenix-Advertiser to snort that he was now “Weary Willie.”

 

   The historical record is imprecise as to what criminal hijinks Indiana Billy found in his future after his run-in with the law in Mokena. What is clear, is that his short stay within our gates was one that undoubtedly stayed in his memory for a long time.