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 25th 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 1st, or they’d cut off their supply.
As the days dragged on, things looked dire for Bowman, when on March 30th, 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 2nd. 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 3rd, the blockaders stood down, and by the 7th, 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 16th, 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 8th, 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 1st 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 2nd, 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 21stcentury Mokenian would also be hard-pressed to find a single dairy cow in our neighborhood.
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