Thy Great Commercial Tree: The Story of James Ducker

   Commerce drives a community, and businesses such as Berkots and Mokena Video immediately bring our village to mind. Known for miles around, they are not only fixtures in our landscape, but they also have the earthy credence of long-established houses that have been a part of Mokena for decades. Long before their and our time, came James Ducker, who was not only one of the first merchants to speak of in town, but whose name is intertwined with the heady, early days of Mokena. 

     Ducker first saw the light of day on October 27^th, 1823 in a small town called Epworth, not far off England’s east coast. The Duckers were a farming family, and members of the peace-loving Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. As a mere lad of 15, James Ducker ventured to the medieval city of Hull, a place around 25 miles northeast of his home. While there, the young man worked in a store for about 5 years, where he learned the ins and outs of the business. As England’s dreary weather came to plague Ducker’s health, so it was that in 1852, at the age of 29, that he set sail for America. 

 

    After whiling for a bit in Chicago, James Ducker headed south to sparsely settled Frankfort Township, where he took up farming. He tried his hand at cultivation for a year, until a disastrous hailstorm ruined his crops. This experience soured Ducker, and in the words of a later historian, “convinced him that agriculture was not his forte in life.” Out of this pitfall, fate led him to relocate to Mokena in 1853, where his name would be sealed to the ages. 

 

    The town as it was when James Ducker moved here was barely worthy of the name, being more so a tiny hamlet clustered around the new Rock Island tracks, which had just been constructed the year before. He was an Englishman surrounded almost entirely by Germans, the community being mostly populated by the latter. The community needed goods, and where there was a want, Ducker found an opportunity, and opened a store upon his arrival. A 19^th Mokenian shopping at Ducker’s would find all sorts of general goods for sale, while almost 100 years later, one Mokena old-timer specifically remembered Ducker selling “boots and kerosene.” An 1870 ad from his store, having appeared in the Joliet Republican, specifically mentioned wares such as "Dry Goods, Groceries, Hats and Caps, Boots and Shoes, and Yankee Notions" while another from a year later listed off “Dress Goods, Flannels, Blankets, and Scarves”. In his Mokena heyday, Ducker had also come to be known across the region as a grain dealer.  

James Ducker, one of Mokena's pioneer merchants, as seen in this circa 1880 image. 

 

     The exact location of James Ducker’s general store remains vague. In the generations after his time, memories became foggy, and conflicting explanations came to light. A 1937 retrospective article in Mokena’s News-Bulletin placed it in a long-gone building close to the southeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets. This jives with the fact that Ducker came to own a sizeable chunk of real estate along the south side of Front Street, running from Mokena Street and stretching east almost half the distance to Division Street. 

 

    As a newly minted storekeeper, Ducker wed Scottish-born Jeanette Allison in 1854, and came to raise a large family with her, at least five of their children surviving into adulthood. By 1862, the Duckers had built a stately home at today’s 11122 Third Street to house their young family. Looking much as it did in the 19^th century, the house was declared a Will County Historic Landmark in 2011. 

 

    After having found commercial success in Mokena, James Ducker moved to Joliet in 1874, re-establishing his store where it would become a fixture for generations. While in business there, Marshall Field & Co. reached out to him as a possible foreign buyer for their firm, but he declined, preferring to stay in Will County. Ducker breathed his last on December 16^th, 1885, in the county seat. His mortal remains were buried in scenic Oakwood Cemetery, where a distinguished monument still stands over his bones. 

 

    Decades after his death, a local history book remembered him as “one of the county’s most influential residents” and one who “long held a prominent place among businessmen of northeastern Illinois.” Before he became wealthy in Joliet, and years before his name was theirs, James Ducker was a Mokena mainstay.  

Beyond the Milky Way: Mokena's History with the Bowman Dairy Company (Part 2)

   If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part 1 of this entry! (The first piece below this one on the page)

 

   In the aftermath of the 1909 tumult, the Milk Producers’ Association grew in influence, and came to boast of an active Mokena local, headed by dairyman and auctioneer Herbert Moriarty. Through the Association’s efforts, patrons of the Bowman plant were receiving $2 per 100 pounds of milk they sold to the company by January 1911. Five years came and passed, and as 1916 rolled around, World War I tightened its grip on Europe, and the Battles of Jutland, the Somme and Verdun dominated the headlines. Meanwhile in Mokena, another battle was brewing, one that dwarfed the troubles of 1909. Eventually dubbed the Milk War by the Joliet press, it luckily didn’t claim any lives, but it wasn’t for a lack of brutality. So it was, that another grim chapter in Bowman’s relationship with its Mokena suppliers began. 

 

Local auctioneer and dairy farmer Herbert Moriarty was the head of the Mokena local of the Milk Producer's Association.

 

   The trouble first started towards the end of March 1916, when the Association suggested to area dairymen to sell their milk for no less than 4 cents a quart, half the cost of retail in Chicago. Initially, Bowman would have none of it, sticking earnestly to its guns with its old price. Mokena producers were incensed, and the March 25^th issue of the Joliet Herald-News shouted that they were “on war paths.” The 187 area farmers who were in a position to sell their product to the Bowman plant set forth an ultimatum to the Chicago-based giant, urging that the new price be met by April 1^st, or they’d cut off their supply. 

 

    As the days dragged on, things looked dire for Bowman, when on March 30^th, all local members of the Association convened at the Mokena Hall on Front Street. A vote was taken, and with one fell swoop, the dairymen stood with other milk producers in Wisconsin and Indiana, and cut off Bowman. 

 

    The dairymen took steps to prevent any milk whatsoever from reaching Chicago. The Herald-Newsdescribed “Mokena seething with farmers”; some had formed a cordon around Bowman’s plant on Marti Lane, while others gathered at the Rock Island depot and shooed away shippers. Roads leading into town were under guard by bands of strikers, some of whom were said to be armed with “hoe handles and stale eggs.” At a time when the US military was pursing raider Pancho Villa south of the nation’s border, media accounts of the local boycott were rife with militant imagery. A newspaper report said the stretch of the Rock Island between Mokena and Chicago “resembled the Mexican border without the firearms.” 

 

    Bowman employee George Osmus was sent to pick up milk from some hold-out suppliers, and while en route to his destination outside town, he came across six farmers guarding a crossroad. Where exactly this happened in Mokena has been lost to time, but when the gang tried to force Osmus’s team of horses to turn back, their heavy handedness backfired. Village constable Fred Mau came to Osmus’s rescue and leveled a revolver at the dairymen, one of whom sensibly talked Mau into putting his gun away. Once the piece was holstered, Mau then brandished a “big hickory stick” and attacked the strikers. Serious injuries abounded after the melee; Byron Nelson came out with head wounds, Daniel Kohl had a fractured arm, and Fred Hentsch was knocked almost unto unconsciousness. 

 

    Tensions were hair-trigger after the brawl. The same day, Fred Brown of New Lenox tried to cross a picket, and was met by outraged farmers who threw his full milk cans into a roadside ditch. They were only later able to be recovered and brought to the Bowman plant under guard. Despite the fact that another warlike meeting took place at Mokena Hall, things were a little more under control on April 2^nd. The tense calm in Mokena was largely due to the fact that sheriff’s deputies from Joliet had by then arrived in town to allow milk to pass through the blockade. Town marshal Conrad Schenkel helped, whose presence drew “hoots” from onlookers. 

 

    Bowman’s reinforcements helped bring a trickle of product to the Mokena facility, infusing the company with a sense of confidence. Meanwhile, farmers around the village that still refused to cooperate fed milk to their pigs rather than sell at the old price. Within a few days, the Herald-News grimly predicted that Chicago was “near a milk famine” due to the situation in our neck of the woods. Miraculously, on April 3^rd, the blockaders stood down, and by the 7^th, news broke that the city dealers had finally caved, and agreed to buy milk from Mokena dairymen for nine cents a quart, a price that the Herald-News snidely commented would be passed on to the consumer. 

 

    As if 1916 wasn’t already bad enough for Bowman, it was about to get a lot worse. Barely three hours after Mokena’s dairymen signed the peace terms, the engineer of an eastbound freight train passing through town in the dead of night spotted flames shooting out of the plant. He slowed his locomotive until it ground to a halt, and laid on his whistle to alert the small village of the emergency, one account even has the intrepid man, whose name was never noted for posterity, dismounting his locomotive and running door to door to awake residents.  Conrad Schenkel, the aforementioned village marshal, was also commander of the Mokena fire brigade, and assumed charge of those who turned out and fought the flames for the next three hours. The only firefighting equipment the village had to boast of in this time was a hand-drawn hose cart, which incidentally, is still the property of the village to this day. Railroad cars on the switch tracks at the plant proved on early obstacle to putting out the fire, but easier access was gained once two switch engines shunted them away. 

   It would later be ascertained that the flames got their start in the boiler room. No one was ever able to get to the bottom of what caused the fire. Despite the best efforts of the 50 or so men who put out the blaze, machinery in the building’s boiler room, engine room and ice plant was totally destroyed, and over half of the mostly wooden plant was gutted. The company assessed its total damage at around $10,000, with all operations at the Mokena facility being totally shut down for ten days.  Meanwhile, on April 16^th, 1916, theHerald-News stated that “a large force of carpenters, machinists and electricians have been working day and night to get the plant in running order.”

   One can’t help but take notice of the timing of this conflagration. To say that it was suspicious, coming on the same night the Milk War ended, would be putting it mildly. Could this have been arson? The smoke still hadn’t cleared. Barely a month after the first fire, another blaze broke out on May 8^th, 1916, when a heap of tar-soaked cork used in the ice plant spontaneously combusted. While the windows in the engine room shattered due to the heat, the employees of the plant were able to put out the flames with a fire house on hand. 

 

Bowman Dairy's milk bottling plant as it appeared after the large 1916 addition, as seen looking west from the intersection of today's Wolf Road and McGovney Street.

 

   Business marched on, and years came and passed. However, beneath a veneer of prosperity in the post-World War I era, discontent was brewing. In the 1920s, a prickly issue reared its head amongst the local dairy farmers, namely that of having their herds tested for tuberculosis. This was a simmering problem that was long in the making, and had been grumbled about as early as 1908. A prime example is the state law that came into effect on New Year’s Day 1909, which directed that dairymen “have their cow barns whitewashed and kept as clean as possible, also that concrete floors be laid in these cow barns, and that each milker be attired in a white apron and that such milkers wash their hands after each milking.” What to our modern ears sounds like common sense, was a somewhat new-fangled idea to the farmer of yore. These directives, combined with the fact that inspection of cattle by government officials was thought to be near, didn’t sit well with a fair number of the agriculturists in Mokena. The opposition lay chiefly in the fact that no small expense was involved in bringing their farms up to snuff, and out of a fear that government meddling in their herds would result in their cows being condemned. 

 

   Health and sanitization were always number one with the Bowman company, and the whole process of accepting milk from the outside farms of the producers was no trifling matter. A typical example of their earnestness about the subject was when the company cut off the supply from local farmer August Hentsch in early 1912 due to typhoid in his family, much to his vexation. When hoof and mouth disease appeared in our neck of the woods at the end of 1914, a shallow ditch was dug in the Mokena plant’s driveway, which was then filled with a liquid disinfectant. Every team of horses hauling milk into the plant had to step through this chemical stew, of which the dairymen were not fans, piping up that the mixture was so strong that it was eating away at their horses’ hooves. 

 

   The issue with the cattle testing never really went away. The Chicago Board of Health began especially strongly campaigning for the tuberculin test in the 1920s, and a measure was even passed that forbade the selling of milk in the city that came from untested cattle. This spelled big trouble for our dairymen, who continued to strongly argue against the testing. A positive result in their herds would effectively put them out of business. In this case, neither state nor federal government would come to their rescue in any meaningful way. So unpopular was the testing measure that in March 1926, of the 162 farmers in and around Mokena who supplied milk to Bowman, only 18 of them had tested their herds. The movement had picked up a huge amount of steam, and a hard deadline of April 1^st was given to the dairymen to have the cattle testing done, after which point if the numbers had not significantly climbed, the Mokena plant would be shuttered. 

 

   So it was, that the first of the month came, and no great sudden change of sentiment had occurred, no last-minute wonder to save the plant once and for all. The doors were padlocked, and this time for good. The local men who worked there were given jobs at a Chicago facility of Bowman’s, and became commuters overnight. The closing was a staggering blow to Mokena, and the significant amount of trade from surrounding farms that came to town via the bottling plant was now lost. The News-Bulletin, our village’s home newspaper, shouted from its masthead the closing in its April 2^nd, 1926 issue, and starkly rued that “this effects every business in town and will mean less money spent locally”, going on that “in short, the dairy business in this section has been nearly ruined and it is probable that the dairy industry will never again be as flourishing as it has been.”  The many dairy farmers possessed of untested herds now faced a decision, either to change businesses, or feed their milk to pigs. A sliver of hope was held out that enough of the dairymen would come around and decide to test their cows, therefore allowing the Mokena plant to reopen in the summer or fall, but this never came to pass.

 

Mokena Mills, a Wolf Road mixed residential and commercial development, now stands on the site of the old Bowman Dairy plant.

 

   Thus the bottling plant on today’s Wolf Road was permanently shut down and mothballed for the next seven years. Mitchel Brewery occupied the premises from 1933 to 1940, and beginning in 1941, the Mokena Wallpaper Mill set up shop here. In 1988 Mokena Mills took over, another wallpaper concern, which kept up operations until June 1998. The rambling building was an old landmark, one that announced to Wolf Road travelers that they had arrived in our village. It was altered and added onto so many times in its long history, that looking at the massive, old place in its later years was like reading a beloved old book, with each new roofline and wing representing a new chapter in its history. It met the wrecking ball in the spring of 2004, and was forever erased from our landscape. What was once an important industry in Mokena, is also permanently gone. Not only is the Bowman plant with its glass bottles and big metal milk cans nowhere to be found, the 21^stcentury Mokenian would also be hard-pressed to find a single dairy cow in our neighborhood. 

  

Beyond the Milky Way: Mokena’s History with the Bowman Dairy Company

    Some places are forever tied with a certain industry, a giver of work and bringer of money to a community. One place might be known for steel, for example, while another might be known for coal mines. While the days in question are now long behind us, Mokena was once a dairy town, through and through. Milk is not only the great nourisher of life, but was also the lifeblood of our community as well. Vast dairy herds once grazed our pastures and brought a livelihood to their owners. In the early part of the 20^th century, the bottling plant of the Bowman Dairy Company not only provided employment for a good number of Mokenians, but also put us on the map as being the center of eastern Will County’s dairy district. 

 

 

   The earliest history of Mokena can’t be written without the humble milk cow. On the record of our years, it stands that in 1860, LaPorte Road farmer Diederich Brumund became the first in our neighborhood to ship milk over the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad to city markets. The single can was pulled into Mokena on a small cart by the brute force of Brumund’s powerful Newfoundland dog. This set a precedent that was followed for decades by local agriculturists, who sent untold thousands of gallons of milk over our railroad for urban retail. After many years of this practice, it was with this very road that an enterprising group of village fathers sought to revitalize the town. 

 

   In the first years of the twentieth century, Mokena found itself in a slump. The completion of the Wabash Railroad through neighboring communities funneled trade that normally came to us through the newer hamlets of Alpine, Marley and Orland, and a nationwide depression that pummeled the country in 1893 also bode very badly for Mokena. The bad condition of the roads leading into town also didn’t help the dire economic situation in this era. As such, after many erstwhile Mokenians moved away to seek their fortunes elsewhere, a federal census taker counted a meager 281 village residents after having made his rounds in 1900. 

 

   Mokena would be a very foreign place to modern eyes in this time, possessing of three modest churches, some unassuming houses, and a handful of mom-and-pop businesses lined up on Front Street. Looking to give the town a shot in the arm, options were discussed and explored amongst the movers and shakers, and it was decided to work with what the village had, namely a robust foundation in the dairy business and solid rail connections. By 1906, prominent citizens began a flirtation with the Bowman Dairy Company of Chicago, which in this time operated at least six plants in the municipalities around the city. On December 22, 1906, a group of villagers made up of mayor Ozias E. McGovney, cattleman Emil Krapp, hardware store owner William Niethammer and prominent farmer Fred Warning made the journey to Bowman’s plant in Barrington. They were impressed with what they saw, and in the words of a local journalist, were “convinced of the desirability of securing such an institution for Mokena.” It was stated that the company would need a minimum of 200 cans of milk through its doors daily in order to run, an order which our dairymen would have no problem filling. Bowman reckoned that a dozen or more jobs would be created in town, a welcome addition to the village in this era. Two days after Christmas another field trip to Barrington was organized, this time the travelers were the mayor’s son Ona McGovney, leading resident W.H. Bechstein and farmers Christian Bechstein, George Cooper and Christian Warning, among others. They also were won over with Bowman’s operation, and thus, through the lobbying of these civic-minded men, the company became very interested in our burg. 

 

   The ball got rolling in early January 1907, when Elizabeth Cappel sold ten acres of her family’s property to the company, this being situated on the west side of Marti Lane, (or today’s Wolf Road) just south of the Rock Island tracks. That April, Bowman turned the first shovel of dirt on the tract when they began building a drain which ran south to Hickory Creek. By June, construction had begun in earnest with the pouring of the new bottling plant’s concrete foundations. With the boundaries of the building staked out, they came to measure 150 by 20 feet, no small edifice in the Mokena of this timeframe. As its wooden walls began to rise courtesy of local contractor George Hacker and his crew, the village’s correspondent to the Lockport Phoenix-Advertiser was already singing its praises, proudly writing in his column that “the milk factory is evidence of Mokena’s rejuvenation.” Meanwhile, within a month, a well on the property was sunk to the depth of 175 feet, containing an impressive 125 feet of water. The work of building the plant moved slowly but purposefully, with an 80-horse power marine boiler being installed in September, along with an automatic engine, water purifier and ice crusher. Finally, the plant’s smokestack rose in the beginning of October, and the operation opened for its first day on the morning of Friday, November 1^st, 1907, when a company bigwig presented Front Street resident Julia Blaeser, one of the village’s oldest inhabitants, with the first bottle of milk to come off the line. By the time all was said and done, it had cost Bowman Dairy $30,000 to build its new Mokena plant.

 

The bottling plant of the Bowman Dairy Company at Mokena, seen here in its original form, circa 1907. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

   In those first days, the outlook was jubilant and optimistic. It was reported that Bowman was “very encouraged” by the amount of local milk that was pouring into the plant on a daily basis, and it was expected that by New Year’s Day 1908, this number would be doubled, when the most prominent dairymen of Mokena and Frankfort would have stocked up on even more cows. These agriculturists, who were on a contract with the company, hauled their milk in big cans to the plant, where it was offloaded and ran through machines before being sorted into smaller glass bottles on site. From there, the bottles were loaded in crates into special refrigerated box cars and shipped over the Rock Island to Chicago, where they were put on the market. By 1910, Preston Hird, a Wisconsin native, had been taken on as superintendent, and around 12,500 pounds of milk was being processed daily, or two boxcar loads.

 

A typical milk can, the faithful workhorse of the dairy farmer.

 

   The bottling plant was an industrious place, but that Bowman could sometimes be a dangerous one to work is proven by the long list of accidents that took place there. Take Fred Werner, the plant’s engineer, whose right eye and face were badly burnt when hot water squirted at them in March 1908. Next up, in the summer of that year, Oscar Christenson had his toe crushed when a cake of ice fell on it. In June 1913, a lightning strike near the building was beamed in through the iron bottle washer inside and the five men working the machine were tossed to the ground by the current. Miraculously, none of them were hurt. Another typical mishap took place on July 22, 1914, when a fast-revolving brush shattered a bottle that was being washed. A storm of glass shards flew in every direction, and John Schenkel’s right hand was nastily cut. These incidents, when taken with all of the others that happened over the years, read like a battlefield casualty report. 

 

   Despite the danger, it was noted in May 1911 that the rank and file who manned the plant were earning $50 a month, or close to $1,500 in modern figures. In the spring of 1918, the plant’s 20 workers were “compelled” to join the American Federation of Labor. The joining fee for the union came out to a steep $5, with dues of a $1 a month thereafter. 

   The Bowman Dairy plant had firmly become a part of Mokena. There was a receiving platform on the side of the building containing an incline upon which farmers had to drive their teams to unload milk. During winter the whole thing would become covered with ice, and to prevent accidents, Bowman’s workers would spread cork particles over the ramp. Years after the fact, local scribe Clinton Kraus recalled how he and his friends, come summer, would collect all the cork, stuff it into gunny sacks, and use the same for buoys when swimming in Hickory Creek. Kraus also fondly remembered how the company sold Mokenians ice from the plant in the dog days of summer, and how Bowman’s engineer would treat him to ice cream that was on hand. Activity at the plant had piqued the curiosity of many in the village, and loiterers and lollygaggers had become such a problem that in October 1908, a sign was hung in the building’s entryway that stated visitors were welcome, but stark red letters “politely inform that loafing is not allowed.”

 

The local crew of Mokena's Bowman Dairy bottling plant, pictured on the plant's loading dock around 1910. They are, top row left to right, George Aschenbrenner, August Pfleger, Ed Schenkel, William Weber and John Schenkel. Bottom row, left to right, are August Teske, Fred Steinhagen, John Helenhouse, William Werner, Howard Beagley and August Werner.

 

   Business at the bottling plant hummed along to such a degree that the building was quickly bursting at the seams. By August 1911, plans were afoot to expand the structure. A wooden wing would be tacked on to the building’s east side, running parallel to the Rock Island tracks and stopping a few feet short of Marti Lane, along with another small addition to the south. George Hacker and his carpenters, the plant’s original builders, were at work again, and by November a new 100-foot brick chimney was finished, which towered over the village for decades. $40,000 later, the ribbon was cut on the new wings in the first part of 1912, with the first electric lights in the concern coming soon after. More workplaces came as well, with employment now being offered for a crew of 18 men. 

 

The newly expanded Bowman Dairy bottling plant at Mokena, pictured circa 1912. (Image courtesy Richard Quinn)

 

   Just as the new additions were ready to be used for the first time, Bowman proudly announced that the Mokena plant was taking on a grand 20,000 pounds of milk every day. Prosperity reigned supreme, and around 34,000 pounds were being handled daily in the spring of 1915. Another addition came in the fall of 1916, when trusty George Hacker’s firm built a masonry section measuring 20 by 100 feet onto the ever-growing factory’s south side, which was to contain the offices of the manager and roomy storage space. 

            

   The history of Bowman’s time in Mokena is one of progress and industry, but also one of occasional disputes with its local suppliers, these being a litany of intensely sharp and acrimonious disagreements. Enter at this point in history the Milk Producers’ Association, a statewide organization not unlike a union. Made up of dairy farmers, it advocated on their behalf to secure the best possible prices for their products. By early 1909, the work of the Association had awoken the interest of many Mokena area farmers, and by and by, they began to join its ranks. After a particularly bad falling out with Bowman in that year, they began discussing alternative uses for their dairy products, and it was collectively decided that separating the cream from their milk and marketing it was a viable alternative. As such, that spring the dairymen banded together under the auspices of the Milk Producers’ Association, leased a vacant lot from Philipena Bechstein on the southwest corner of Front Street and Marti Lane and hired none other than village contractor George Hacker to build a rustic, one story wooden building thereon to house their skimming station. 

 

Seen here posing on the plant's floor around 1915 are the Mokena workers of Bowman Dairy. John Schenkel is at second from right. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

   Although the majority of milk producers decided that skimming cream would be the way of the future, not all were in favor of the plan. Two of them, Henry Yunker and Fred Hinspeter sold their cows and left the business during that season. At the end of April, a haughty Bowman manager from Barrington came to town and told the farmers to be done with the strife, and demanded that they sign the company’s contract and stop building the skimming station. This was rejected. The Joliet Weekly News predicted that Bowman’s Mokena branch might close, even after a company man presented the dairy producers with what were considered good prices, but nevertheless the milk men dug in their heels and held out, stating they wanted the prices that the Producers’ Association was recommending. By the start of May, the worst had come true, and the milk bottling plant closed its doors, not quite two years after they first opened. A resident of neighboring Marley watched from the sidelines and opined to the Weekly News that “…it is a short-sighted policy on the part of the farmers and a hard blow to the business interests of Mokena, to compel the closing of the plant, none will deny.” Those in our environs who were still looking to sell their milk shipped it directly to Chicago themselves, and Front Street’s Rock Island depot was swamped with 147 cans on May 1^st, 1909. 

 

   That week, the skimming station was officially up and running, having received a whopping 5,310 pound of milk to be processed in its first few days. 8 cans’ worth of cream were skimmed from this initial bulk, which were shipped to the Beatrice Creamery Company, a man from this company was also on hand by May 13^th to help with operations. Meanwhile, across the railroad tracks to the south, the Bowman plant was being slowly gutted, with much of its machinery being stripped away and shipped to the company’s plant in Barrington. 

 

     What could’ve been a truly dire situation for Mokena was avoided when Bowman manager Preston Hird and another company man finally negotiated a contract with the local dairymen that was to their liking. With this, young cobwebs were dusted away and the plant’s doors were thrown back open after having been closed for about two weeks. On May 13^th, 1909, Bowman’s Mokena plant re-opened with a boom, finding more milk cans delivered to it then on its first opening day.

 

Mokena's Bowman workers man a machine called "the Ferris wheel", which was used for washing milk bottles. Seen here around 1915 is manager Herman Schweser at far right, next to him stands John Schenkel. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

   However, the dust hadn’t settled yet, and not everyone was happy. A letter from an anonymous dairyman appeared in the May 20^th issue of the Joliet Weekly News, and the author huffed that “The re-opening of the bottling plant by no means signifies a victory for Bowman.” He went on that the product now being sold to the plant would be shoddy, namely that “the milk it receives will be drawn from four to six miles in the summer sun, in very filthy cans, but it is claimed that by its cooking and doctoring process the stuff will keep for weeks.”  The new-found sense of calm that had settled in after the re-opening in the spring was misleading, as that November the dairy farmers were once again not signing Bowman’s contracts after it was felt they were slighted by low prices. A very critical situation was felt in the community, and again a closing of the plant was threatened. The farmers sent the company a petition for an increase of 20 cents per 100 pounds of milk, and by the end of December the situation had evened out enough that dairymen felt they were again getting fair treatment and were coming back to Bowman.

 

   Meanwhile, the Front Street skimming station closed in the summer of 1909, briefly re-opened that fall in fits and starts during the second round of trouble with the company, but by the following year the venture was on hiatus, and the whole endeavor was officially extinct by the spring of 1911, when the station was rented to a pair of Orland blacksmiths.

Check back next week for part two of this installment!