History is everywhere, and if one were to ask just where to find it, the possible answers would leave the inquisitor’s head spinning. Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and Tombstone are but a few of the places one would be told to look. Limiting the locations to just those in Illinois, we’d even hear of Grant’s Galena or Lincoln’s Springfield. However, we don’t even have to leave home to find it, for if we stay within the gates of Mokena, we’d find 11042 Front Street, a place steeped in well over a century and a half’s worth of local verve.
To understand the decades of history at this ageless location, we must first part the fog of time and look to a gentleman named Moritz Weiss. He came into the world on January 10th, 1830, and was a native of picturesque Neuenbürg in the kingdom of Württemberg, in what is today southwest Germany. The son of an esteemed doctor, the young man became a pharmacist in his homeland before spending time practicing his trade in various locales in Switzerland. Good fate brought him to America, and then to our community in 1854, then a mere hamlet located along the newly built Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad.
After he got settled in his new home, Moritz Weiss married Julia Gall in October 1856, an estimable Mokena lady who was described at least once as “one of the best hearted women in town” as well as having been immortalized by history as being the proprietor of the village’s first inn, along with her late first husband, Carl. After their marriage, the historic record indicates that they continued to keep up a rooming house together, counting six lodgers in the summer of 1860, including young Samuel Tinley, Mokena’s Rock Island agent. During the tumultuous years of that decade, one that would be fraught with civil war, Caroline Emilie Fischer, a Mokena infant whose father wasn’t on the scene, was taken in by the Weisses and raised as their own. The only child of Moritz and Julia, she would be called the “light and sunshine of their pleasant home.”
At some point long disappeared into the pages of posterity, Moritz Weiss hung out his shingle and gained the honor of being Mokena’s first pioneer pharmacist. He was successful in his business, and decided to upgrade in the prosperous years immediately after the war. In February of 1867, Weiss bought a lot on the northeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets from Leonard and Sarah Rudd for $550, or around $10,200 in today’s money. By the summer of 1868, he had built a brand-new building on this site that would contain space for his pharmacy on the first floor, and living quarters for his family directly above. The new place was considered a jewel in Mokena during an era when there was much construction. Barely two years after the shop opened, trouble struck when, in the words of the Joliet Republican, “some scamps who had been off on a drunk” hurled a huge rock through the pharmacy’s front window under the cover of darkness one Saturday night, causing no small amount of damage. Julia Weiss was scared out of bed by the racket, and in going to investigate the commotion, received for her trouble a nasty cut on her foot from a shard of glass.
The former pharmacy of Moritz Weiss is seen here at left in this circa 1910 image.
A journalist of the time would later describe the Weiss pharmacy as having “a full supply of bitters and sweets and a general assortment of soothing syrups, worm lozenges, plasters and nursing bottles.” The same writer noted, while painting a vivid picture of the Mokenian, that Moritz Weiss was “fat and jolly” and was possessed of a “merry whistle.” Another contemporary beamed that he was “a man of liberal education and of good judgment”, both of these points being backed up by the fact that he owned a substantial personal library. Weiss was also well involved in local affairs, having taken the office of justice of the peace, as well as Frankfort Township clerk and treasurer.
That the earliest years of this landmark took place in a world completely different from ours is best demonstrated by the fact that at the end of 1881, the newly formed village board ordered Weiss to clean up a cesspool that had formed in his yard, a problem begat by the lack of indoor plumbing the era. The problem wasn’t completely solved, as nearly two years later in August 1883 the town board of health noted that there was too much manure on site, not to mention an unsanitary outhouse.
The final resting place of Moritz Weiss in St. John's Cemetery.
Pharmacist Weiss died in town on February 7th, 1882 after a battle with dropsy, and as a show of his stature in the community, the cortege that carried his earthly remains to St. John’s Cemetery was one of the largest that Mokena had ever seen. After her husband’s passing, Julia Weiss retained ownership of the pharmacy property for decades. She later married a Jolietan named Louis Blaeser, and hence the place was known by some Mokenians simply as the Blaeser building. Happenings here for most of the last two decades of the 19thcentury are hard to put into focus, although the building still seems to have served the servants of Hippocrates, with local Civil War veteran Dr. William Becker maintaining his office here in roughly this time frame.
An enterprising young pharmacist named Richard Hensel, a 28-year-old Mokenian by way of Chicago, moved into this address in March 1896 with his goods, and the Mokena post office followed him a little over a year later. The druggists kept coming, as Dr. D.P. Teter set up shop here in the spring of 1904. Teter had spent ten years in Omaha, Nebraska and received his diploma from the Baltimore Medical College, before also attending post graduate courses at the Johns Hopkins School in Chicago. In the summer of 1905, the whole place almost literally went up in smoke. While the cause of the nasty fire was never gotten to the bottom of, the blaze started behind the prescription case, and wiped out Dr. Teter’s entire stock of drugs, while one local newspaper also said that the “furniture and building (were) badly scorched.” Luckily, the building’s bones were good, and it sprung back from the fire better than ever.
By the dawn of the 20th century, Julia Blaeser was in the eighth decade of her life, and was considered the doyenne of Mokena. After she passed away in May 1911, the reading of her will revealed her generosity to those she loved, and ultimately her niece, Julia Schiek, inherited the old drug store on the corner, moving in with her elderly mother Elizabeth in the fall of that year.
As Father Time marked the passing days, Willard Martie later opened an ice cream shop and pool room in this historic spot, holding his grand opening in August 1927. Going into the venture with partner Walter Homerding, the 22-year-old Martie was the son of prominent Mokenian Edward Martie, a village trustee and future mayor. The dealings at the shop weren’t completely on the up and up, however, as a Prohibition era raid by a special investigator from the Will County state’s attorney’s office in the fall of 1930 netted such contraband as two barrels of beer and four and half jugs of moonshine that had been secreted away on the property. The state’s attorney had been tipped off by some concerned Mokena women, who reported that the illegal booze was being peddled to underage boys, and that illicit gambling was also taking place on the premises. While Gus Braun, Martie and Homerding’s employee, plead guilty to the charges and was hit with a stiff $200 fine, it remains unclear what consequences the ice cream shop’s proprietors felt. For posterity’s sake, Willard Martie denied the rumors and stated to the village News-Bulletin that they had no basis in reality.
The historic Blaeser building on the northeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets.
Going forward, in the spring of 1943 the property was purchased by L.S. Janes of the Sears & Roebuck firm, who was taking it off the hands of Mokenians William Helenhouse, August Hentsch, and George Knudson, its mortgage holders. Mr. Janes immediately go to work sprucing up the old place, which by the World War II years was regarded as being somewhat rundown, with the News-Bulletin even calling it a “dilapidated eyesore.” Nevertheless, the paper acknowledged that the newly re-furbished building would be a “real asset to the community” and called the work a “fine improvement” to the historic building. It was made over into three apartments, the first inhabitants of which were Mr. and Mrs. John Feltenhouse, the former working with the WLS radio transmitter northeast of town, local Rock Island telegraph operator Mr. Frogge and his wife, as well as Mr. Janes’s mother.
Thus it remains to this day, a silent witness to decades of local flavor. This time-honored landmark has stood for nearly 150 years at Front and Mokena Streets, at a place that some villagers have even called “the Times Square of Mokena.” May it stand for 150 more years.
Very interesting read about our town!!
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