History has been kind to the earthly memory of our earliest settlers, those honored few who braved the fierce unknown of the American west, and were the first to break the virgin soil upon the prairie where Mokena would later stand. The families of John McGovney and Allen Denny are well remembered, as they rightfully should be, while the collective recollection of other early clans has all but evaporated from local memory. One of these, the Clevelands, weren’t exactly the first to make their home here, but they still were made of the brave and hearty stock that has earned them the honor to be called our pioneers.
As all stories have a beginning, ours opens with William Bryan Cleveland, who was born in the state of New York on October 21st, 1820. Being composed of the rugged stuff that characterized our forefathers, he heard the call of the west as a young, unmarried man, and carved out a home for himself in the wilds of the yet-unnamed Frankfort Township in 1844. As was typical of the pioneer’s lot in this time frame, the early residents of our region lived in hardscrabble log cabins and tended to modest farms on the wide-open plains of eastern Will County.
William Bryan Cleveland, circa 1860.
In the same period, another Cleveland made his home in our midst, this time being Orrin Baker Cleveland, a fellow New Yorker who was three years the senior of William. When the dense fog of time is parted, the historic record seems to indicate that the men were cousins. Which one of them got here first is lost to the ages, although a shred of evidence exists that Orrin might have been here as early as 1839.
An 1850 census taker found the men living in the same household, and with the formation of Frankfort Township’s government that year, William Cleveland was elected as its first supervisor, indicative of his status as a well-respected resident of the area. In 1854, William took as his wife Emily Haven, the daughter of prominent New Lenox settlers and a niece of our own Allen Denny. Pioneer life being one of toil and hardship, Emily passed away a little over a year later at the age of 23, joining their infant son Willie, who died the same year.
During these years, a rustic blacksmith’s shop could also be found on the Cleveland place, housed in a little building that was fashioned out of hand-hewn oak timbers. It would’ve likely been lost to the ages, if not for a tale told a 100 years later. The teller would say that he heard that none other than Abraham Lincoln’s horse had been shod there, while his master, not yet our president, lodged at the time-honored Old Brick Tavern on the Haven property further west on today’s Route 30. While an exciting story, it must be regarded as just that, a patriotic tall tale, as by this late date, there is no way to verify its truth.
By the time of the Civil War, William Cleveland’s farm contained a narrow but solidly sized stretch of land, the center of which would be located at today’s intersection of Wolf Road and Route 30. Reaching all the way north into the space that now contains the Old Castle Woods subdivision, and measuring south to the Joliet Cut-Off railroad, it was enough to provide an existence for this man of the soil. Orrin Cleveland’s property sat immediately to the west, and contained more or less the same acreage. The timeline is murky, but it would be remembered decades later that somewhere in this era, William supplemented his income by keeping a store in the young community of Frankfort.
During the trying days of the Rebellion, the Cleveland family contributed greatly to the North’s war efforts, when Orrin’s sons Frederick and Charles bore arms with Will County’s 100th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and marched in the Union army for three years. Both young men were lucky to return home in one piece. In the euphoric days after the end of the Civil War in 1865, William Cleveland married a second time, this betrothal being on May 22nd of that year to Stella M. Martin, a native of Vermont. While she was 26 years his junior, the two Clevelands welcomed six children into the world that modern research has been able to identify, namely Lillian, another Willie, Clarence Martin, Mabel, and Eva. A young daughter, Emily, didn’t live to adulthood.
William B. Cleveland was very involved in the community, and aside from his supervisor’s seat, he held the office of justice of the peace for eight years, and also served at least one term as the director of the small, one-room schoolhouse that sat in the middle of his property, having stood at our current intersection of Wolf Road and Route 30. Sometime before 1873, William’s farm grew by absorbing the property of his cousin Orrin, who for the time being, disappeared from the historic radar. In these days, in addition to farming his 125 acres, William Cleveland also made a living as a stock raiser.
The long-established agriculturist breathed his last in the summer of 1883, and a little over a decade later, in early 1894, word trickled in that Orrin Cleveland died back in the family’s ancestral home of New York. In silent testimony to the fact that he considered Frankfort Township his home, the mortal remains were shipped back to our neck of the woods to be interred in the Cleveland plot in Frankfort’s Pleasant Hill Cemetery.
A new era dawned in the history of the family’s acreage outside Mokena in May 1908, when Clarence Cleveland, the 35-year-old son of William and Stella, bought the farm from his father’s estate. Lately a resident of Chicago, the young Cleveland now found himself the owner of a property which by this time had grown to include a large tract stretching north almost to Hickory Creek, hugging the east side of modern-day Wolf Road. Shortly after the transaction was complete, Clarence Cleveland returned to the farm of his birth with his wife Anna. An educated man, he received part of his learning in Joliet as well as at a business college in Chicago. With the passage of time, Clarence Cleveland became a prosperous and respected dairyman, and could afford to hire the Mokena firm of Julius Oswald to build one of the first concrete block silos in our neighborhood in fall 1912. By and by he set about improving the old place, and the following summer, also had a massive barn built, measuring in at 124 by 36 feet. Both the silo and the barn were local landmarks for decades.
Seen here around 1999, the concrete block silo on the former Cleveland farm was long a familiar sight to Wolf Road travelers. Situated slightly west of the intersection of Route 30 and Wolf Road, the old silo was demolished shortly after this image was made.
Clarence Cleveland was very involved in dairy affairs, and represented the Mokena local of the Milk Producer’s Association before the state legislature. He also held strong opinions, and would distinguish himself as an avid letter writer, not just to editor William Semmler of the News-Bulletin, but also to such prominent papers as the Chicago Tribune. His communiques covered a wide range of topics, all of which were matters important to his fellow dairymen.
Not only was he one of the most influential dairy farmers in early 20th century Mokena, but he also had a particularly strong sense of boundaries. Over the years, more than one village child would be warned not to venture onto his property, as he was known to guard it by shotgun, with which he also stringently enforced hunting laws on his farm. This aspect of Cleveland’s reputation became so well known in Mokena, that a friend of his felt compelled to write to the News-Bulletin in February 1931 and come to the defense of his character. Jay Butler, who had resided on the farm with Clarence Cleveland for two years, put forth that anyone would be allowed to enjoy the immaculate woodland of the Cleveland estate, as long as they first kindly asked permission to venture therein.
Before all else, Clarence Cleveland was a man of nature. He created a wild flower preserve on his property, one that was described by a contemporary as “one of the outstanding beauty spots in the county.” His passionate love of the natural environment also led to one of the most colossal shakeups that Mokena has ever seen. When Wolf Road was due to be concreted for the first time in the 1920s, plans called for the new road to deviate slightly from its original route and be built through a large tract of forest on the farm. From 1929 to 1934, Clarence Cleveland waged a bitter, four-year war against the county, in which he personally attempted to halt the construction of the road through his land. From his battle station, he gave as his motive the protection of his priceless, pristine timberland, which would be decimated by road construction, specifically having cited “the destruction of several hundred of (his) most beautiful forest trees, flowering bushes and vines.” Cleveland also readily stated that more than a few of the trees were over a century old. In his corner for the fight, were groups as prestigious as the Illinois chapter of the Wild Flower Preservation Society and the Illinois Conversation Council. In the end, a suit was brought against him by county bigwigs, and compromise was finally reached in April 1935. The road was finished, and a minimum of trees were hurt.
Clarence Cleveland died on the old homestead in what would have been his 74th year on April 30th, 1947, after a long illness. His passing was observed with great attention in Mokena, with the News-Bulletin shouting the headline from the front page of its May 2nd issue. Before long, the property was no longer in the family. The old Cleveland farm house, which saw over a century of history pass by its door on the southwest corner of today’s Wolf Road and Route 30, is long gone, as well as is any other trace of the Clevelands’ existence on their property. A little way north of the intersection is a quiet street that now bears the family’s name, having been laid out long after their existence here. Venturing down this road, one is surrounded by serene woodland. When the moment is just right, one can feel the spirit of Clarence Cleveland and his love for the land that was his own.
Very interesting history of this family. I went to school with a Cleveland. I wonder if the family had branched out to Tinley or perhaps a coincidence.
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