Bombs Away: The 1911 Safecracking of Mokena State Bank

    Money makes the world go ‘round, and while most of us gain our living through honest means; it can drive others to get it through more nefarious ways. So it was that in the autumn of 1911, a team of yeggmen, or safecrackers, descended upon our village under the cover of inky darkness, and laden with explosives, tried to blow their way into the Mokena State Bank’s safe. 

     A new edition to the community’s streetscape, the bank was built on Front Street in 1909, after having been founded by a group of local businessmen. With a regal facade of Bedford stone and a small interior heated by coal, the prominent landmark stood directly across the street from the Rock Island depot, and couldn’t be missed. After likely having cased the bank for some time, the team of unknown burglars closed in during the early morning hours of Monday, September 25^th, 1911. They scored their entrance to the building relatively easily, simply having broken in via the front door after jimmying upon its lock. 

Front Street circa 1915. The Mokena State Bank, seen here at left, was a commanding presence in town.

 

    Surviving historical records aren’t rich with details regarding their target, the bank’s vault. One account describes its door as “being almost impregnable, made of three layers of different grades of steel” and an exterior wall made of brick, which lends to the idea that the safe may have been built into the bank’s structure itself. Before getting to work that morning, the yeggs lined the exterior of the vault with empty sacks and grass to dampen the sound of the coming explosion. They set the charge, dove for cover, and threw the fuse. 

 

    It turns out that the burglars didn’t do quite as good a job muffling the blast as they hoped, for the sharp report echoed over dark Front Street and was heard by at least one neighbor. Anna Sutter, a grocer’s wife who lived next door to the bank, was jarred from her slumbers at about 2am. She peeked through a window, and seeing a soft light leaking from a window at the bank, Mrs. Sutter put two and two together and promptly lost any desire to investigate in person.

 

    Inside the bank, the robbers moved in to assess the results of their handiwork. As the smoke and dust settled, they realized that their bomb blew the safe’s combination dial clean off, but also that a weird twist of fate caused the force of the blast to jam the vault’s inner doors firmly shut, their hinges and workings having been horribly mangled. The yeggs realized that their shot at the riches within the steel walls was now hopeless, and the would-be safecrackers fled the scene. 

 

    Meanwhile, Anna Sutter was raising the attention of other Mokenians by phone, but as she was busy at the task, she caught notice of the sounds of some hurried footfalls disappearing into the night. The next morning, bank officials were in damage control mode. In checking over the building, only one item was actually missing: the teller’s revolver. Elsewhere in the village, two residents noticed their carriage rigs were gone, and local minds made a connection, surmising that the bandits had stolen them.

 

     In the words of a journalist at the Joliet Weekly News, local inability to access the vault “put a stop to the bank’s business to some extent.” The issue with the doors became a huge vexation, as no one in Mokena was able to open them. Specialists from Chicago were summoned, none of which were successful in prying them open either. At one point, an elaborate scheme was attempted involving tearing out part of the brick wall on the exterior of the vault, then boring a hole through to the inside in hopes of triggering a manual release. After hours of work, this too proved fruitless. 

 

    In its vulnerable state, night security was being provided by Mokenians John Frisch and Philip Werner, who both toted shotguns on the job. On September 29^th, four days after the blast, bank affairs were still at a standstill, and in the words of the same Joliet journalist, the institution had by now become a “heavy loser.” At around this time, representatives of the safe’s manufacturer had come all the way from Cincinnati to try their hands at solving the door crisis, and they too were no more successful. A Mr. Loeding of Chicago’s Ocean Accident and Guarantee company changed the tide of events on October 3^rd. Working a sharpened rod through the hole previously drilled into the vault’s side, Loeding was finally able to manipulate the lock, thus finally opening the doors.

 

     Four days after the blast, customers began to come and go as usual, and a sense of normalcy returned to the Mokena State Bank. As far as history has noted, no one was ever prosecuted for the attempted robbery. In terms of suspects, the nearest anyone could think of were some suspicious strangers that were seen at a village picnic shortly before the attempted burglary. While the failed safecrackers of 1911 escaped, Mokena’s townsfolk rested assured, knowing that their money stayed safely in local hands. 

 

Face to Face with History: The People of Pioneer Memorial Cemetery

    Mokena is a place rife with landmarks. Touring the streets of our village will reveal a handful of buildings that predate the Civil War, and dozens of other structures that have long since passed their centenary mark. Here you have Little Al’s Tavern, probably the most famous of them all, and there the old St. Mary’s Church, both prominent places well steeped in local history and flair. It’s impossible to forget the Ebert grain elevator, about which a book could be written. Even the railroad tracks have been here a long time, with the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific having been completed in 1852, without which our community wouldn’t exist. Taken as a whole, these places are all fixtures in our fair burg, but no landmark is as old as Wolf Road’s Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. It was here before they all were, and is older than the town itself. The only object in Mokena older than these ancient burial grounds is the road alongside it, which at the time of the cemetery’s founding was nothing but a narrow path cut through the prairie and stands of trees, so cramped that the Potawatomi who blazed it had to traverse it single file. 

   It’s very easy to overlook this spot, as it presents itself as more like a park than a nearly 200-year-old ossuary. These prim grounds hold the earthy remains of at least 36 souls, but likely contain many more. They were all people like us, with vivacious personalities, with hopes and dreams and love for their families, not just barely legible names on centuries’ old stone. While our most historic place, this hallowed acre is one of our most puzzling. No comprehensive records of interments here appear to have ever been kept, henceforth all that is known about the identities of those entombed here is what can be read from their gravestones and the thinnest of threads of information that have been remembered over the years. A modern researcher has to rely on the scant documentation that was done of these stone tablets before they became unreadable, such as in the pieces written about the cemetery in local newspapers that now survive as brittle clippings, or the handful of photographs that thoughtful minds had the wherewithal to take in decades past. Even a few time-honored local families can recall stories passed down over the generations about kin having found their final resting place here. 

 

  Let es embark on a tour of the grounds, if you will. In a bygone century, this simple acre was known as Denny Cemetery in the mouths of locals, after the family upon whose estate it was situated. To get at the very roots of this place, a proper introduction to this clan must be made. The first of them to arrive in what would later become our neighborhood was intrepid pioneer Allen Denny, a 44-year-old resident of Chautauqua County, New York, who joined the smallest handful of other early residents in 1834. Having made the trek with the Holmes family, themselves early settlers of New Lenox Township, Denny set down his stakes here on the wild, untamed prairie upon which Mokena would later sprout. In his company were his wife Lucy, and at least two sons and one daughter. Our neck of the woods also proved alluring to Allen’s younger siblings, Hepsibah Haven and Lysander Denny, who made their homes here before the decade was out. Allen Denny had been a storekeeper before his arrival in Illinois, and also served in the New York militia during the oft-forgotten War of 1812, fighting the British at the Battle of Black Rock. 

 

   By February 1838, the Dennys of the Hickory Creek settlement were joined by the family patriarch and matriarch, Charles and Lucinda Denny, who made the long journey from New York to reunite with their adult children. The elder Denny was a man with an interesting past. 

Born Christmas Day, 1759 at Pauldingsdown, in Duchess County in southern New York state, he would become part of the venerated generation that fought for our young nation’s independence in the Revolutionary War. As an 18-year-old, Charles Denny served a stint in the New York militia in the summer of 1777, where he and his company saw duty at West Point, now the home of the famed military academy, then the site of a defensive fort, where they built a bunker known as the “Bomb Proof.” While in the militia that summer, Denny fed his comrades in his position as the company’s cook. Before the war’s end in 1783, Charles Denny would serve three more stints bearing arms for his home state. Years later, he would remember the times he saw not only Generals Arnold and Putnam, but also recall the time he came face to face with none other than General Washington. For his faithful service, Denny would later receive a pension of $31.66 per year, or a little over $800 in modern figures.

This granite boulder was placed over the grave of Charles Denny in 1939 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)

   Charles Denny breathed his last on August 6^th, 1839, aged nearly 80 years, succumbing to the infirmities of old age. His wife, Lucinda Denny, preceded him in death by four days. Allen Denny buried his parents on a quiet rise on his prairie acreage, next to the old Potawatomi trail. This and the rest of the land around it wouldn’t officially become his until 1841, when the federal government placed it on the market in Chicago and Denny legally purchased it. With construction of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad through part of his property in 1852, he platted a small subdivision a little north of the cemetery alongside the new tracks that came to be named Mokena. With those move of foresight, Allen Denny became the father of our town and sealed himself into immortality.

 

   The little cemetery grew around the graves of Charles and Lucinda Denny, with their son allowing his neighbors to use it when the need arose. The final resting place of the elder Denny in our midst and his status as a fighter in the Revolution became a badge of honor for Mokenians over the years, as he is one of only four veterans of this conflict to have been buried in Will County. In 1916, as a new war was tearing Europe asunder, the Louis Joliet Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution procured a new gravestone for the old soldier. It was shipped to Mokena over the Rock Island railroad, where it arrived in the middle of winter. Village correspondent to the Joliet Herald-News William Semmler, who played no small role in getting the stone, arranged to have it stored in the local grain elevator until the spring thaw. The new marker did its job, but was rather plain and austere in looks. So it was that in the November 1939, another group of dedicated ladies of the Daughters of the American Revolution, (this time being the General Henry Dearborn chapter of Chicago) dedicated a more regal granite boulder over the grave. Both gravestones still hold eternal watch over Charles Denny’s dust to this day.

 

   Heading northeast from the Denny plot, we come to the next oldest graves in the cemetery, the earthen tombs of Ira and Truman Smith. The lettering on the simple grave markers has been so worn by the winds of time that they have since been completely obliterated from the stone. The son of John and Lucetia Smith, young Truman crossed the great beyond on October 28^th, 1839, aged a little more than a year. While Ira Smith, one of Rufus Smith’s sons, survived into what would have been his seventh year before he too passed in 1839, the presence of these and other children’s graves in this historic cemetery paint all too clearly a picture of the rough, unforgiving life that awaited our forefathers on the prairie. While modern research has as of yet been unable to determine if these two Smith families were related, an adult Trueman Smith arrived in the young Hickory Creek settlement by way of Vermont in 1835. Although this man spelled his first name slightly different, the uncommonness of it begs the question if he couldn’t possibly have been a relative of the infant Truman.

   Incidentally, Truman Smith’s small headstone is one of several that have been pilfered from the cemetery over the years, serving as a macabre souvenir to some unknown person. In a stroke of good grace, caring hands returned this piece of history back to the cemetery at the end of the 1990s.

 

   Heading deeper into the cemetery, one arrives at the grave of Sibyl Bennett. Her first name is still clearly legible on the gray rectangular slab that stands at this spot. Born in the fall of 1762, she came of age in colonial America, a time and place vastly and almost unimaginably different from ours. She departed on May 11^th, 1844, when the village of Mokena wasn’t even a dream in hers or her neighbors’ minds. The wife of one Ephraim Bennett, it’s been long since forgotten how this couple fit into the grander scheme of our early pioneers, but a Lester Bennett of Vermont was living in the newly formed Frankfort Township in 1850. Any connection has been blurred by the span of decades. 

 

   The solitary grave of Barbara Shaffer is also found in Denny Cemetery. Born in 1766, she is yet another of the cemetery’s denizens who would have well remembered the days of British rule on the thirteen colonies. She lived until September 15^th, 1846, having acquired the age of 80, at a time when the life expectancy for the average American woman was a meager 20 years. Barbara Schaffer’s name survives as her only legacy, all details about her life and family have been lost to the fog of ages. 

 

   Immediately to the south of Barbara Shaffer is the Andresen lot. Abel Catharina Andresen, who died November 29^th, 1864, rests here beneath a gravestone that has been broken in two. Her name can only be read with the most steadfast patience, as it has been worn smooth by over 150 years of wind and weather. The symbol of a hand, with a finger extended toward the heavens, can still be recognized at the top of the stone. Abel Andresen, a native of what is today northern Germany and whose maiden name has been alternately recorded as Heukmüller, Hückmüller or Hickmüller, married Hans Reimers Andresen in 1857 and made her home near Mokena in the years before the Civil War. Their children Hans and Ann are here too, Ann having met her demise as a three-year-old in 1863 when her dress caught on fire from a wood-burning stove. 

 

   Veering west toward the hum of Wolf Road, the visitor comes to the most unique monument in the cemetery, that which bears the name F.J. Bez. The faint German inscription on this truncated obelisk records that this person was born on August 18^th, 1798 and departed this world in 1856. The Bezes were an old family in Mokena, having arrived in our community in the 1850s via the kingdom of Württemberg. A census taker found mother Barbary Bez here in 1860 living in the boarding house of Andreas Markert. Her adult son George was a confectioner in town in the same era, and also held the office of Mokena postmaster starting in June 1861. Another son, John Bez, worked in a brewery near today’s Frankfort, and became a Union volunteer in the Civil War with the fabled 100^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and offered his life upon the altar of freedom at the bloody battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. George Bez also became a warrior in this conflict, and suffered a debilitating wound from which he never completely recovered.

   With all details lost on the family member who reposes here at Denny Cemetery, it is likely that he is the family’s patriarch, whose full first name has disappeared in the pages of posterity. 

 

                                                                                    

                                                                                       

              The monument which stands over the grave of F.J. Bez is the most unique in the cemetery. The likeness of the hawk was added to the top of it in the 1990s. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)

 

   Occupying a prominent spot in the middle of the cemetery are the graves of John and Betsey Atkins. True pioneers if there ever were any, their lives beg a closer look. Born October 28^th, 1783 in Claremont, New Hampshire, John was wed in marriage with Elizabeth, who always went by Betsey. When and where this union occurred, as well as Betsey’s surname, have long since disappeared into the ether, like so many of the details of this sacred plot. Eventually the young family packed up and moved to Waterbury, Vermont, where John shouldered a musket with the state militia during the War of 1812. He was a man of no small piousness, and it was later remembered that John “wouldn’t commune at the Lord’s table with a Christian who hadn’t been immersed,” referring to the act of baptism. Together John and Betsey Atkins raised at least four children, who all came with their parents to Will County in 1834. It was said that most of the family made their way to the Hickory Creek settlement in a wagon, while John traveled on horseback, carrying a trunk of their possessions behind him. Representative of the hardship that was the pioneers’ lot, their first meal here was bread and sour milk. The Atkins bunch settled along what is today LaPorte Road, with father John taking a long, narrow tract of land that ran north from the current S-Curve, reaching all the way to what we now know as 191^st Street. 

 

John and Betsey Atkins, seen here around 1860. They are the oldest known Mokenians of which a photograph exists.

 

    John Atkins was a strong anti-slavery man, who lived in an area known to be the home of more than a few abolitionists. He was a subscriber to The Western Citizen, a virulently anti-slavery newspaper published in Chicago, and was even known to help with the activities of midnight riders on the Underground Railroad, which was active in the Mokena area before the Civil War. Decades later it would be recalled by local old timers privy to the secret activity that Atkins shuttled refugee slaves to their next safehouse in his wagon, buried under hay to conceal their presence. 

   John and Betsey Atkins passed away within a few days of each other in January 1864, and were interred here in Denny Cemetery. Betsey’s gravestone, having been pieced back together after it was shattered into several pieces, bears the motif of an open book, representing the book of life. Like that of Charles Denny, John Atkins’s original grave marker has been lost since before anyone can remember. Nowadays, a stately marble tablet stands over his bones that was put there by the Mokena Women’s Club in 1997. 

 

The grave of Betsey Atkins in Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)

 

   Of this handful of personages detailed, they are all united by the fact that some sort of marker stands over them. Countless others have been destroyed and stolen from the cemetery over the years, and thus, many graves exist here that are forever lost from the historic record, nameless for eternity. Careful research has shed light on some of them who rest here, such as Lysander Denny, son of the aforementioned Charles and Lucinda Denny. An early resident of the Hickory Creek settlement like his older brother Allen, Lysander was a millwright by trade and had built a sawmill on the south bank of the creek as early as the 1830s, opening one of the earliest enterprises in Will County. He later moved with his immediate family to Joliet, but relocated to the New Lenox Township hamlet of Spencer upon its founding in 1856. There he died in March 1872 at the age of 74, whereupon his earthly remains were brought to Mokena to the old family cemetery. 

 

   An unmarked grave also holds the infant Mathilde Krapp, the daughter of a Mokena butcher who was interred here on the eve of the Civil War in September 1860. No headstone bears the name of Albert Abrahamson, a local farmhand who froze to death in January 1897. One of the last times the soil was broken at Denny Cemetery was to receive the earthly remains of Abram Evans in March 1896. The historical record has yielded multiple variations of his name, noting such variations as Abram Evins to Abraham Evans. He was a New Yorker by birth, and like untold thousands of his generation, he volunteered for duty in Abraham Lincoln’s army with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Evans mustered into the 50^th New York Engineers as a 29-year-old in September of that year, and before his three-year term of service was done, he had gained the engineers’ rank of artificer. While he was in the ranks, this regiment saw hard fighting, such as when the unit was detailed to build bridges under withering enemy fire at the battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia. 

   Great portions of Abram Evans’s life have fallen into the cracks of history, and are impossible to reconstruct at this date. At some point after Mokena’s incorporation in 1880, he found his way to our village, where he eventually made a home on the south side of Front Street, between Division Street and today’s Midland Avenue. As a fearless Union soldier, one who rallied to the flag during our country’s most dire crisis, his memory should never be forgotten by our community. 

 

   Denny Cemetery, or Pioneer Memorial Cemetery in modern parlance, is a priceless Mokena landmark. Here one truly comes face to face with our history. To understand the story of this hallowed acre is not to learn about famous personalities from the history books, but of brave veterans, simple farmers and everyday heroes. They were the normal people who built our town.