Just down the road in Lockport stands the Heritage Village, an interesting open-air museum under the auspices of the Will County Historical Society, that houses a curious collection of antique buildings that have been moved to the shady spot along the I&M Canal from all over the region. Here is the Wells Corner schoolhouse, there the Symerton railroad depot. In the settlement is also a small, shed-sized structure that upon first sight, one might generously call a shack. This nondescript, completely ordinary building holds an inordinate amount of history, for it’s the erstwhile Mokena calaboose, or jailhouse. Fate has also tied it with one of the most unique personages in our community’s history. This small edifice’s biography, as well as the story of how it came to make its home in Lockport, is worthy of closer inspection.
The year 1880 was a meaningful one for our village. In June of that year, the male residents of Mokena successfully voted to incorporate the community, after at least two failed previous attempts. At the time, our nation’s flag had 38 stars, President Rutherford B. Hayes was in the White House, and the Civil War had been over for 15 years. Ours was a small town of a few hundred residents nestled amid rural surroundings along the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. In these days of yore, young Mokena could sometimes be a rough and tumble place. Serious crime was rare, but hardly a weekend passed that didn’t contain alcohol-fueled rowdiness on the part of farm hands, laborers, and other residents of the area, all of whom were well supplied by the seven saloons in town.
One of the new village board’s first acts was to build a calaboose, a place to house offenders while they sobered up. In November 1880, a local carpenter of Hessian birth named Wilhelm Stermer was given the contract to construct the small building, his price being $120, or around $3,200 in today’s money. The town fathers chose a site for the calaboose that, in their words, was located “on the road east of H.J. Miller’s lane and joining Elijah McGovney’s farm.” While the McGovney farm abutted the railroad tracks on the southern edge of the village, where this exact spot would correspond to in modern Mokena isn’t totally clear. By January of 1881, the small, rustic building was completed, and as noted in the original village ordinances, any inmate was entitled to “a supply of good and wholesome food three times a day.”
The calaboose was not long for its first home. In May 1884, barely three years after having been built, and for reasons lost in the ether of time, the diminutive structure was moved to a lot on Front Street, it now being situated across the street from the blacksmith shop of Robert Turner. The jail sat on village owned property, sharing the piece of land with a wooden engine house, which contained the horse-drawn vehicle belonging to Mokena’s newly formed fire company.
Shortly after the move to the village proper, a few improvements were made to the town lockup, namely the addition of a window, and also of a wood-burning stove. With winter approaching, the village board decreed in the fall of 1886 that vagrants, or “tramps, which cannot be gotten rid of otherwise”, would be locked in the calaboose overnight by Mokena’s sole police constable. In exchange for his services, the board would compensate him 25 cents per drifter upon their release at daybreak. Undoubtedly glad to escape the biting Midwestern cold in the glare of the jail’s stove, it was up to the inmates to feed it from crates of wood kept in the building’s two cells.
In theory, one cell was for male offenders, while the other would be reserved for women, although historical evidence is lacking that there were ever many prisoners of the gentler persuasion. The calaboose’s accommodations were not anything to write home about, consisting of a few rough plank bunks that hung from the wall via a chain along with some scratchy blankets. What the jail lacked in comfort, it did not make for in security measures. A notable occurrence was the 1909 imprisonment of two Chicago youths who had been caught shoplifting, and their subsequent escape under the cover of darkness, when they burned away the bastille’s door from its hinges with a red-hot poker.
Every man who spent a night here had a story, be he a local who had gotten too acquainted with John Barleycorn, or a stranger who blew into town bent on causing trouble. Included on the record of years, is the inebriated chimney sweep who trundled off a Rock Island train in December 1903. As soon as he got to Mokena, he “became vociferous at once” and in the words of a local news correspondent, village constable Oscar Klose set about “to place him where he would have just himself for an audience.” The liquored-up man proved too much for Klose to handle, who had to secure the help of Front Street blacksmith Albert Braun and town butcher Paul Rinke in wrangling the offender to the calaboose. “Appearing as crazy as a loon for a time”, the stranger wound up smashing the stove and one of the bunks into smithereens during his stay.
Not all those who spent time in the old calaboose were law breakers. It was not uncommon for traveling wanderers, romantically deemed “knights of the road”, to track down the constable and request to spend the night in the domicile. If it wasn’t otherwise occupied, their wish would usually be granted. One such lodger was 66-year-old visitor John Felix in February 1913. Village officer Conrad Schenkel had kindling and coal on hand for building a fire that wintry night, and reminded Felix that he could help himself to a pail of water if he got thirsty. The out-of-towner replied that he hadn’t had any water in 13 years, only sating his thirst with beer, liquor or coffee. In fact, the Christmas season of 1912 was so exceptionally busy in terms of itinerant travelers, that lawman Schenkel had the idea to keep a logbook in which the names and place of origin of each wayfarer would be kept.
The wooden jail occupied a prime location within the village, situated on the outer edge of the business district on Front Street. So it was that in 1916, Mokena’s first village hall, a small brick structure still standing at 10940 Front Street, was slated to be built on the site of the old calaboose. By this point in its history, the lockup was a little worse for the wear. William Semmler, the town correspondent to the Joliet Herald-News and, incidentally, the village clerk, called it “a disgrace to the village and not a fit place in which to lock up a man.” Another observer from the same time also dismissed it as an “ancient pile.” Thus after having stood at this spot for 32 years, the old shack was relocated yet again. This time, the mover was Dick McGovney, a local man who bought the primitive structure for $20. After putting a series of log rollers under the building, he attached it to a team of four horses and had it dragged a half mile south across fields to its new home.
As he would come to be a figure indivisible with the history of the old calaboose, it’s worth a detour to explore the life of McGovney at a closer level. Every locale, from the biggest city to the tiniest hamlet, has citizens forever associated with it. Place and person become inseparable, and someone who could be called “pure Mokena” was Dick McGovney. Born Walter McGovney on his parents’ farm just outside the small village on February 21st, 1862, his lineage bespeaks local history. His grandfather, John McGovney, became in 1831 the first non-native resident of what would become Mokena, while his mother’s dad, Mathew Van Horne, was another early settler of Frankfort Township. Not long after Walter’s birth, his father, Elijah McGovney, began serving in President Lincoln’s army as a wagon master, and was lucky to safely return to his farm in 1865. Walter came to be called Dick, and his early years weren’t short of adventure, as he and has family struck out on the pioneer’s trail west when he was a young lad. It took the McGovneys three weeks to reach Missouri by wagon, where en route, father and son slept under the conveyance, armed and ready to fend off highwaymen. Ultimately, luck wasn’t kind to the family in their new home, and they returned to Mokena with a couple years.
As a young man, Dick attended school in Mokena until the 8th grade, and came of age in the rural environment that was the community at the time, one of agricultural existence and small-town life. In adulthood, he spent time working in Montana, but returned home in 1911, when he declared that “Old Illinois is good enough for me.” After coming into ownership of the former jail, McGovney positioned his new house on the south side of LaPorte Road, at what is today the eastern boundary of the Mokena Park District. He lived a Spartan, rough-hewn life in this abode, with neither indoor plumbing nor electricity, and gained his only heat from the ancient wood and coal burning stove. Of the two cells, one became his living space, and the other was eventually converted into a chicken coop, the poultry being McGovney’s companions.
In the mid-1920s, Dick kept a small coal yard near the Rock Island depot, but mostly gained his livelihood by taking on odds and ends around town, and was also known to help with garden work in the village. He was the image of a farmer of the old school, coming to Mokena clad in overalls and smoking his corn cob pipe. McGovney was a lifelong bachelor, a ruggedly independent spirit, and starting around 1940, he had a steadfast companion in a black dog that was his shadow, following him everywhere he went. He was a well-known usual at Morry’s Tavern on Front Street, where the dog would patiently wait outside for his master.
As Dick McGovney got older, he became a much sought-after local character. When a Chicago Tribunereporter wrote the tasty booklet Mokena Memorabilia in 1945, the author called the then 84-year-old “the marvel of Mokena, for his vim, vigor and vitality.” He told the writer tales of days gone by, and especially expounded on the time he could’ve had his choice of “42 old maids and widows” in town, but “the trouble was, I couldn’t make up my mind which one I wanted.”
In the sunset of McGovney’s days, his little house was almost lost in a disastrous fire. Chuck Manhart, a member of the village’s volunteer fire department and a near neighbor to Dick, was on the scene quick that day. He found smoke pouring out of the building, and as he arrived, McGovney was in the act of saving all of his canned goods from the blaze, when Manhart noticed that the old man’s hat was smoldering. He tamped the embers out of his clothes, saving the nonagenarian from serious injury. It was discovered that the would-be inferno was caused by a defect in the antique chimney. As such, the original peaked roof wound up being a complete loss. In true Mokena spirit, McGovney’s neighbors built him a new one, which this time was a completely flat construction.
Dick McGovney lived in the old calaboose for over four decades, and passed away in his simple home on January 18th, 1958, just short of his 96th birthday. He was interred at the historic Marshall Cemetery just west of Mokena, a burial ground that his family had been using for nearly 100 years. The News-Bulletin, the village paper, ran a long obit hailing Dick as a “link with early Mokena” and describing his free character, noted him as a “man who stood on his own two feet all his long life, and while he was always willing to give help to anyone, he never asked for any.” In his time, every resident of Mokena knew Dick McGovney, and while he’s been gone for decades, his memory still lives on in the village.
The historic structure that McGovney called home sat forlorn and dilapidated on the edge of town, with more than one local child considering it haunted. By 1973, the Mokena Fire Department was considering setting it aflame for use in a practice burn, getting rid of it once and for all. Enter at this critical moment the Will County Historical Society, a group of preservation-minded individuals who cringed at the vision of the building as a heap of charred timber. After completing some formalities, a Joliet relative of Dick McGovney’s named Mary Jane Osman transferred ownership of the calaboose to the group, who delicately transported it to Lockport. Shortly after its arrival, the old lockup underwent a thorough restoration to its original 1881 appearance, aided greatly by the memories of none other than Edwin Yunker, the Mokena farmer who spent most of his life across LaPorte Road from the jail-turned-house. Today it is a centerpiece of the Heritage Village, a place where the curious come together to learn hands-on about life in days gone by.
Few could have guessed that this simple dwelling would have survived the tides of time for these last 140 years. Its rescue is a triumph of preservation. Within its simple walls, lay nearly a century and a half of history.
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