Holy War: The 1899 Baptist/Methodist Fight

   Churches are the foundation stones of a community. They are sanctuaries of peace, a place where tumult and strife are left outside. Their congregations are made up of town folk, people from all walks of life who come together for a common purpose. However, the flock of a church is flesh and blood; people who are not perfect, and from time to time it is only natural that disagreements among them should arise. One such falling out happened in Mokena in the distant days of the 19^th century, involving our community’s Baptist and Methodist congregations. The strife eventually reached such a fiery, caustic head, that only a judge could solve the issue. The final outcome would have profound results for one of the parties involved.  

   To peel back the layers of this story, one must turn back the pages of history to the earliest days of our village. As early as 1855, a mere three years after the town was first platted, a Methodist congregation was holding services in the Mokena schoolhouse, a sort of local multi-purpose building when class wasn’t in session. It’s possible that the framework of this early assembly was descended from an even older one, as a group of pioneer Methodists had begun meeting around 1837 in the Hickory Creek settlement, the community that was the precursor to today’s Frankfort and Mokena. 

 

   The hamlet of Mokena on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad was growing bit by bit, and in the years immediately after the Civil War, the Mokena Methodists began to raise money through subscriptions to build their own church. In later years, a story would be passed down that the funds came from the sale of a stray horse. After the long, tedious work of collecting money was over, the brand-new sanctuary was dedicated on December 15^th, 1867, proudly occupying a prominent spot just east of their old meeting place in the schoolhouse on Mokena’s Public Square, a piece of land in the north end of village reserved for schools and churches. There they joined the quaint edifice belonging to the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church. 

 

   As the years marched onward, the Methodists enjoyed a comfortably sized congregation and shining, prominent place in the community. The membership of their Baptist kin was a trifle smaller, but had no less secure a place in Mokena. After the establishment of a local Baptist society sometime around 1851, predating the arrival of the railroad by one year, this group of the faithful eventually held their meetings in the town schoolhouse, just like the Methodists. Upon the completion of their peers’ church building in 1867, the Baptists entered into a neat arrangement with them to share the use of the sanctuary, with each congregation worshipping on alternate Sundays. The record of the years indicates that much was done hand in hand with the Methodists; a Sunday school was even conducted in unison with them during the 1870s. 

 

 

 

Seen here around 1910, the Methodist church stood on Second Street at the current location of St. John’s Christian Community Center. In 1899, the ownership of this building was bitterly disputed with the local Baptist congregation. 

 

 

   Somewhere in time, at a point long since lost to the ages, a bitter dispute arose as to who the rightful owners of the church were, and a straw broke the proverbial camel’s back, landing the two feuding parties in the court of Will County Circuit Judge Small in December 1899. Excitement was great in the case, with the Joliet papers being keenly interested in the proceedings. The Republican declared that “the war in Mokena has begun”, while the News promised that many witnesses would be called to testify, among them would sure to be some of the oldest settlers of the community.

 

   A big point in the Baptists’ defense was that not a few of them who had been on the scene since day one, were under the firm impression that the building was erected for both congregations jointly. One of the first witnesses called was George H. Cooper, member of a prominent local farming family. Under his examination on the stand, he refuted that Baptists’ claims, saying that in all his years of affiliation with the Methodists, he had only ever heard of the sanctuary as strictly belonging to them. A tricky attorney attempted to trip him up on his own words, trying to coerce Cooper into saying that the Baptists had a right to use the building. He remained stoic as a rock on the stand, and “denied positively” ever having made this remark. One of the main foundations of the Methodists’ defense was that when the money to build the church had been raised over thirty years before, that it was solely taken up in their name, while the Baptists stuck to the claim that theirs was a “union church.”

 

   After a period of deliberation, Judge Small made his decision just before Christmas, ruling that the church in Mokena was property of the Methodists. After the dust settled from the episode, the Baptist congregation, without a real home of their own, withered and died. Their Sunday school chugged along on life support, being conducted in the vacant Geuther building on Front Street, but they lost their meeting place when Frank Hirsch turned the place into a saloon at the end of 1902. 

 

   After that point, there is no further mention of a Mokena Baptist congregation on our collective timeline. The original group of worshippers disappeared into the fog of history, and any invoking of their name over the decades was always done in the past tense. It wasn’t until the fall of 1954 that the Parkview Baptist Church was formed in town, holding their first services in the VFW hall on Wolf Road, before building their own sanctuary on LaPorte Road and Scott Street a year later. Needless to say, this time there no plans for sharing their property with anyone else.