Arising at the crack of dawn, milking cows by hand, herding them into pasture, preparing hay for bedding, and maintaining all the tools of the trade. These are but a select few, a tiny handful, of the many responsibilities that a dairy farmer has on his plate for just one day, winter or summer, rain or shine. A farmer must have mechanical and analytical skills, as well as raw strength for repetitive, strenuous tasks. Our village’s heritage is purely agricultural, and farms once dotted our community’s landscape in every direction one looked. This lifestyle was the everyday existence for so many in Mokena, but now it is totally extinct in our surroundings. There is however, one place in our midst that can be visited to absorb these old ways. McGovney-Yunker Farm on LaPorte Road is a gleaming jewel in our town, and a certified National Historic Landmark to boot. Now frozen in time, this place once abounded with life. While the farm and its quaintness remind our 21st century eyes of something far separated from our lives, there is a long, untold story about the history of this old spot, one of real people who lived and loved just like us.
The McGovney-Yunker Farm on a snowy winter's morn. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)
As we turn back the pages of history and follow the threads of time, we find the beginning of this story with John and Nancy McGovney, two brave, rugged pioneers who in the spring of 1831 were the first young family of European descent to settle the land where Mokena would later stand. These intrepid explorers made their journey to Illinois in a covered wagon via Adams County, Ohio with five small children in tow, ranging in ages from ten to two. After the McGovneys’ arrival, three more would join the bunch. They carved out a primitive home on the untamed prairie, and built a home out of logs hewn from the Hickory Creek timber. They had barely gotten comfortable in their new surroundings when the Black Hawk War broke out in April 1832, an oft-forgotten conflict between Illinois settlers and elements of the Kickapoo, Sauk and Meskwaki tribes. When news drifted to the McGovneys of the outbreak of hostilities, they immediately packed up their belongings and fled to more thickly populated points in Indiana, it was said, on advice of the friendly Potawatomi who inhabited what would later be Frankfort Township. When the former Ohioans returned to their Illinois home after the war’s end that August, they were very pleasantly surprised to find out that their Potawatomi neighbors had tended to their property in their absence, taken care of their animals, and even left unmolested a loaf of bread that was left baking in their haste to escape.
The exact spot of John and Nancy McGovney’s pioneer homestead and where it corresponds to in today’s landscape remains a prickly issue. What is definitely known, is that John McGovney formally purchased two separate 80-acre tracts of land on May 20th, 1841 from the federal government land office at Chicago, after having squatted on them as a tenant. Eleven years later, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad would bisect this property, which enclosed part of the future village of Mokena.
With the passage of years, beginning in 1857, ownership of part of this tract began to transfer to John and Nancy McGovney’s youngest son, 21-year-old Elijah. Over time, he added on to it, creating the acreage that is today known as the McGovney-Yunker Farm. One of the first white children to be born in the wilds of the yet unformed Frankfort Township on July 29th, 1836, Elijah McGovney wed Katherine Van Horn in September 1857. Their union ultimately welcomed nine children to the world, of which six survived to adulthood, namely Theresa, Walter (called Dick), Edward, Ada, George and Mattie. All of them would become well known and respected Mokenians. The 1860 federal agricultural census paints a vivid picture of the McGovney farm in this period, giving it a value of about $6,000, or roughly $175,000 in today’s currency. No small-time operation, the farm boasted of $100 worth of farming implements and machinery, and three horses, five milch cows, thirteen other cattle, and six swine. That year, Elijah McGovney estimated he had harvested 150 bushels of wheat, 400 bushels of Indian corn, about 100 bushels of Irish potatoes, and 40 tons of hay.
In this same timeframe, the United States was entering a great existential crisis, and the Civil War erupted in the spring of 1861. A little over a year later, after President Lincoln called for 300,000 more men for his army, Elijah McGovney volunteered for duty on August 22nd, 1862 in the 100th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, the newly organized Will County regiment. While donning his blue uniform, he served as the unit’s wagon master as well as a message carrier. The battles of Stones River, Chickamauga, and Franklin, some of the darkest days in our country’s narrative, which stand so starkly on the pages of our history books, were for Elijah McGovney places of intensely personal experience. He survived the war with life and limb in one piece, and was mustered out of the army in June 1865 as a hero of the Union. According to a story passed down in the McGovney family for generations, during his time at war Elijah had taken under his wing an orphaned slave child, and after the end of the conflict, he came to Mokena to the farm, where he lived as a member of the family. While his name has disappeared into the mists of time, it has been remembered that after he struck out on his own, he became a successful preacher.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the McGovneys decided to try their fortune in Missouri, and much like his father did a generation before, Elijah and his brood made the tough, three-week journey via a wagon. Years later, his son Dick would recall sleeping nights with his father under the conveyance, armed to the teeth to ward off potential highwaymen. Luck was not in their favor, and two years later the McGovneys came back to their farm just outside Mokena.
Disaster struck on the unlucky date of Friday, August 13th, 1880, when a destructive fire broke out in their farmhouse. The blaze started a little after noon, and as it was the height of harvest season, help tamping the flames was scarce, but a fair amount of the McGovneys’ furniture and clothing were rescued. The entire house was completely ruined, but luckily, no one fell victim to the fire or smoke. By the following month, Elijah and his family were hard at work building a new house, and this structure which rose out of the ashes is likely the western portion of the current domicile on LaPorte Road.
Danger in the form of fire visited the McGovney farm again in June 1883; this time the tool house fell victim. The family was roused from their beds at 1:00am, and by the time they rubbed the sleep from their eyes, the building couldn’t be saved. Only by the “dexterous efforts” of Elijah and his sons could the conflagration be checked, but not before some embers had started another fire underneath a barn adjoining, which was also soon under control. Ominously, evidence on the scene pointed to the flames being the work of an arsonist.
The McGovney family’s time on the farm is tangible to this day, for aside from their farmhouse which still stands triumphant, other improvements that came in his time which remain now were a chicken coop and brooder house which likely date from the 1880s, alongside a well house and smokehouse which were erected around the same time. McGovney also had a new windmill put up at the end of 1883, which is regrettably long gone. In this time, a persistent problem cropped up on the farm that any longtime Mokenian will be familiar with, namely the seasonal flooding of the northern edge of the fields that adjoin the village proper. On June 17th, 1893 a special meeting of the mayor and board of trustees was called to address a petition that had been handed to them by Elijah and Kate McGovney. In it, the couple asked the village dads to “contribute a share toward draining a slough” that had formed on their property. The note went on further to “claim that their lands are kept in bad condition by reason of wash and overflow from surrounding lands, including that which comes from territory inside of the limits of the Village of Mokena.” The board left the matter with the Committee on Public Property and Nuisances, which ruled at their next meeting that “said slough would not stay there long enough to effect the sanitary condition” of the village, and therefore, the McGovneys’ request for help easing the financial strain of the flood was shot down.
Mokena resident and Civil War veteran Elijah McGovney, seen here around 1890.
As Elijah McGovney got older, he began to slow down on the farm, and eventually moved to Chicago to live with his daughter Ada. In the meantime, his middle son Edward took over the agricultural responsibilities in Mokena. The younger McGovney was a tinkerer, and gained a patent in 1905 for a contraption that picked bugs off spud vines. It also appears that an eastern wing was added to the McGovney farmhouse during Edward’s time at the helm. His tenure is also marked by the third nasty fire in the farm’s history, having taken place on August 5th, 1911. This time, the alarm was sounded at 3:00am by eagle eyed youth Herbert Hohenstein of Front Street, who spotted flames in the inky darkness across the fields south of his home. After Hohenstein’s having called the Mokena telephone exchange, many villagers received word of the emergency and flocked to the farm to help. The fire was confined to two large tool sheds on the south side of LaPorte Road across from the farmhouse, and after the blaze was extinguished, the buildings were completely destroyed, and McGovney had lost a binder, corn planter, hay loader, hay press, plows and other implements. Altogether, it was estimated that he had suffered a loss of about $2,000. No immediate cause was ever found for the disaster, and like a menacing ghost of the 1883 fire, it was guessed that the inferno was the work of an incendiary.
The historic McGovney-Yunker farmhouse on LaPorte Road, a priceless Mokena landmark.
Over the years, the problem with the so-called “slough”, or the flooding of the northern half of the farm’s fields, never really went away. However, in the World War I era villagers made the best of it, as a Mokenian in February 1916 noted it to be a “fine skating rink”, which was being used by town youth every night. On March 3rd, 1921, in what would have been his 85th year, Elijah McGovney peacefully passed away at his daughter’s home in Chicago. His mortal remains were transported back to his old Mokena home, where his funeral was held on the farm, being attended by a “large number of old settlers”, in the words of the village’s News-Bulletin. Mourning quickly gave way to chaos, as disunion and animosity sowed themselves in the McGovney family in the aftermath of their patriarch’s passing. That summer, Dick McGovney filed a suit in the Will County circuit court to break the will of his father, having charged that his siblings used “fraud, misrepresentation, and coercion” to compel their father to make the document. Furthermore, he declared that his father was not mentally capable of having made the will on his own accord when it was first filed in 1917, alleging that his brother Edward and sister Ada dictated the document, composed it, and forced their father to affix his signature to it. It took almost two years for the dust to settle, the case being settled out of court between the heirs in March 1923.
The entire McGovney farm, composed of 120 acres in all, was sold at auction on Saturday, December 8th, 1923. The high bidder was Elijah and Kate McGovney’s youngest son George, who forked over $130 per acre, or about $2,000 in modern funds. For reasons that have long since been lost to time, McGovney didn’t keep the place for long, and he flipped it a year later. At this station in the timeline of history, we can close the book on the McGovney family, and put it in its rightful spot in the library of ages. Let us now open a new volume, and enter at this point the Yunkers, where a fresh sunrise begins.
A striking view of the McGovney-Yunker Farm from the north. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)
After having been in the McGovney family for 83 years, Fred and Carrie Yunker acquired the farm in 1924. Born Friedrich Junker on the day after Christmas 1869 to parents of sturdy Swiss origin, the new owner was a native of Orland who, along with the rest of his family, eventually anglicized the spelling of his last name to Yunker. Called an “enterprising agriculturist and horseman” by those who knew him, Fred Yunker tied the knot with Carrie Cappel, a member of a long-established Mokena family, in the spring of 1913. The couple came to make their home on the old Holstein farm on today’s LaPorte Road at the well-known s-curve, where they made their living working the land and tilling the soil. Their time spent here would likely remain dearest in their memory, for it was here that their union was graced by the birth of their only child, Edwin Walter Yunker, on March 13th, 1918.
After Fred and Carrie Yunker first set down their stakes on the old McGovney place in 1924, they had the stately dairy barn from the Holstein property moved east down LaPorte Road to its new home, setting it down atop a limestone foundation dating from an earlier era. It still remains today, as robust as the day it was moved. The Yunkers made other improvements to the property during their years here, making the farm uniquely theirs. A cattle shed and hog house was built around 1940, three open-wire corn bins were added in 1945, along with a new corn crib five years later, which like the dairy barn, all still stand.
While growing up on his family’s farm, Eddie Yunker attended Mokena schools, where he would become a star player on the basketball team. He and his family weathered the Great Depression with the rest of the village, and were known to help other Mokenians who weren’t as fortunate as they were in this dark chapter of our history. The Yunkers generously gave to the family of Mabel Kropp when they could, a local mother raising two children on her own. Her young daughter Laverne Mae would often travel from her home on Wolf Road to the Yunkers’ to visit and accept what they could humbly send her way. In doing so, she formed a tight connection with Eddie, and the two were married in the spring of 1940 in Laverne’s Mokena home. Like countless young men of his generation, Eddie Yunker was summoned to the army during World War II, but Uncle Sam ultimately felt he’d be more useful to the country’s efforts if he stayed on the farm, feeding the men and women in uniform, rather than marching with them. During the war years, Eddie and Laverne would bring their two sons Lee and Ron into the world.
Eddie and Laverne Yunker on the farm, with LaPorte Road in the background. (Image courtesy of Brian Yunker)
In April 1948, Fred and Carrie Yunker retired and moved to town, settling in a new home they had built on Mokena Street. A new epoch was heralded when Eddie and Laverne inherited the farm not long after the passing of Fred Yunker in 1949. As was the case since day one, the Yunker farm was in a slow but constant state of transformation, with a garage workshop being completed in 1960 along with two doghouses the same year. A new tool and implement shed was completed around 1965, and a metal shed on the south side of LaPorte Road was added in 1975. Among his many hats worn in Mokena, Eddie Yunker helped found the village park district in 1959, and served on its board of directors from its inception until 1975. He also had a chair on the board of Mokena Elementary School, District 159. To top things off, the Yunkers were active members of St. John’s Church.
To know Mokena, was to know the Yunker farm. This author can reach back into his memory and recall being delighted as a child by the sight of Eddie’s many dairy cows in their pasture, and can also easily remember what little traffic there was on LaPorte Road in this time occasionally being halted as the farmer would lead his herd across the road back to their home on the north side of the thoroughfare. It was also not uncommon to see Sailor, the Yunker border collie, chasing cars on LaPorte Road.
Craig Yunker, a Mokena resident and Eddie and Laverne’s grandson, started out helping his grandfather around the farm by hunting rodents, all the while receiving a bounty of a dime per mouse, and quarter for every rat. He eventually became Eddie’s right hand man, which was a full-time job in itself, and fondly remembers that “it couldn’t have been a better childhood out there in the fresh air.”
His cousin, Lisa Welz, paints a vivid picture of their grandparents. Her grandfather was a man of few words, but when he spoke, she remembers that he “commanded attention.” He was a farmer of the old school, a man who was able to do parts of the job that would easily rebuff those not accustomed to them, and simply accepted them as facts of farm life. Eddie Yunker was “very patient, extremely kind, and very smart”, but was also possessed of a keen sense of humor, as Lisa recalls that he loved to tease and joke around. Those who took part in Eddie’s dairy milking demonstrations readily relate how he would squirt visitors from the cow’s udder when they least suspected it. Craig Yunker related that his grandfather was a man of class, and “never said a bad word about anybody.” He was a man of great height, standing in at a regal 6’2’’, and as Lisa Welz related to the author, “he had huge hands, his fingers were the size of bananas!”
Laverne Yunker is remembered as a talker, a lady whose family was everything to her, one whose passion was cooking and baking. She kept a huge garden behind the farm’s silo, one that was brimming with produce such as squash and zucchini. Lisa Welz remembers the stream of visitors that always seemed to be stopping at the farmhouse, where her grandparents treated everyone as a friend, offering all food and drink, turning away no one.
In this same vein is the way the Yunkers opened their farm to area youth. Craig Yunker recalls how his father Ron’s position as a history teacher at Lincoln-Way brought him into contact with a fair number of troubled youths from the community. Ron Yunker came to be a mentor of sorts, offering the teens places to work on the family farm in Mokena, where Eddie and Laverne welcomed the opportunity to teach them. After Ron Yunker’s untimely passing in 1987, Craig well remembers the “dozens of kids” who approached him to tell of how his father and grandparents had changed their lives.
Animals played a huge role in life on the farm. The Yunker cows are remembered as docile creatures, but the bulls had a fiery meanness to them. Lisa Welz says this is best exemplified by the time Eddie entered their enclosure, and one charged him, knocking the pitchfork from his hand that he carried for protection. As the bull went in to attack again, Bimmie, a rough-around-the-edges dog of Lisa’s that had been sent to live on the farm, sprang into action. He jumped up and fiercely latched onto the bull’s tail with his jaws, allowing Eddie to escape. She calls the dog’s rescue of her grandfather nothing short of divine intervention. Craig Yunker remembers his grandfather’s heart for animals, and how he would tear up whenever a calf would be stillborn. There was also the time Sailor, the Yunker border collie, was stolen from the farm. Eddie searched high and low for his companion, but found no trace of him, and was absolutely heartbroken. One day a few months later, a neighbor called Eddie out of the blue and relayed the news that Sailor was back, and had been seen in the pasture. The farmer hurried to the spot, and the dog immediately came to Eddie, despite being underweight. From then on, he never needed to be chained up, as he never left his master’s side. Lisa Welz says “Grandpa was so happy and relieved to him back.” It was never resolved who took Sailor, or where he was in his absence.
As the years passed, and the other farms in Mokena became unceremoniously swallowed up by development one by one, Eddie and Laverne’s farm stood out like a beacon in the night. As time went on, they fended off developers who offered them astronomical sums for the property. They could’ve lived like royalty in their final years by taking any of these offers, but instead the Yunkers chose to give the farm, the scene of so much of their love and labor, to all of Mokena. In 1997, Eddie sealed a deal on the farm with the Mokena Park District, in the understanding that it be kept up for future generations of villagers to enjoy and learn from. All was sealed with a handshake, as he was an honorable man, and his word was his deed.
Laverne Yunker, who had been a mother figure to so many in Mokena, passed away in 1995, and Eddie kept working the farm until his last harvest in the fall of 1997, when his second cousin Richard Erickson helped him do the work. Eddie Yunker crossed the great beyond at the age of 83 on July 22, 2001, a date which marked the end of an era. Through the tireless efforts of Mokenian Jen Medema, the McGovney-Yunker farm was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 31st, 2006, after she spent two years laboring on the immense nomination project.
As the farm is such a prominent place in our town, the Yunkers, especially Eddie, have taken on an almost larger than life status in the community. Craig Yunker summed it up perfectly when he said that being with his grandfather “was like working with Paul Bunyan, he was so strong and tough.” The onus of preserving the farm, this wondrous historical treasure, is in the hands of the Mokena Park District, its current owner. All Mokenians with love in their hearts are looking to them, in fervent hope that the Yunkers’ wishes are carried out. The responsibility is big. If any piece of the farm were to be removed from the landscape, as has already been attempted, no replica could ever take its place. Eddie and Laverne were the last of their kind, and our community owes it to their memory to keep and preserve their farm.
Great post
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