Mokena is built upon a solid foundation of agricultural bedrock. Farmers were the lifeblood of our community for well over a century, and when one looks in just the right places, traces of this old way of life can still be found amongst the blur of modern suburban living. One building in the heart of the village is a stalwart reminder of this heritage. The steel-clad eminence rises behind Mokena Street’s Eggcetera café, standing defiant against the tide of time, the weathered metal sign across its side reading “Ebert Farm Service” bearing mute witness to its former purpose. Turning the pages of history even further back, this hulk served as a grain elevator, a place where our farmers stockpiled their harvest. It may be hard to imagine a time when this old structure wasn’t here, keeping watch over Front Street and the Rock Island tracks, but it’s not even the first grain elevator to stand on this site.
The Mokena grain elevator, a village landmark for over 135 years.
What can verily be called the first industry in Mokena started on this spot as early as 1855, a mere three years after the village was first platted, when early entrepreneur Noble Jones and his uncle, Cyrus Cross, had a flour and saw mill built here. These two men are inseparable with the early development of our community, and did business under the name of their firm, Cross & Jones. Alas, this enterprise’s success wasn’t written in the stars, and by 1858 the steam-powered mill had eaten up all of Noble Jones’s savings, and the concern winked out. After a succession of other owners, the huge structure was gutted and converted into a grain elevator in 1865, with the end of the Civil War.
The world of our forefathers was one of wood and open flame, that on one hand brought shelter, heat and comfort to their lives, but on the other, could prove to be the scourge of their existence. The many disastrous fires that dot the history of Mokena starkly attest to this. Business hummed along at the local elevator until the dreadful winter’s night of February 26th, 1884, when one of the worst conflagrations on record occurred. At about 11:30 that night, while returning from a party in one of the village saloons, resident William Miller in some way happened across a fire that had started in a corner of the structure’s basement. According to the Mokena correspondent to the Will County Advertiser, Miller “immediately gave the alarm” and in no time the fire brigade and a large number of village dwellers materialized on the scene. Our community’s ladies were in fine form, and the same correspondent described “the zeal and energy shown by a number of our very best women in carrying water”, while the writer lamented what he saw as a lackadaisical effort by a few of Mokena’s men, who “stood around with their hands in their pockets.” A real scribe with a flair for the dramatic, he ended his reportage with the quip “Bah with such specimens of Homo.”
Despite the sweat and toil exerted by the Mokenians who fought the fire that night, it was all for naught. The blaze made short work of the wooden building, and despite the best efforts of those who came to fight the flames, the granary was completely destroyed. Five railroad carloads of grain stored inside also went up in smoke. By the time all was said and done, the total monetary loss of the elevator alone came out to about $3,000 or close to $88,000 in today’s figures. Villagers were at a loss as to how to explain the origin of the fire, and in time it came to be assumed that it was the work of an arsonist.
In the aftermath of the conflagration, a heap of scorched timbers and an empty foundation marked the site. From this smoldering ruin arose a new edifice, a marvelous phoenix from the ashes. This rebirth was had at the hands of John A. Hatch, a man whose mark is still visible in more than one place in our community. Readers of this page will be familiar with him, a lifelong Mokena area resident who was born in the wilds of the yet-unnamed Frankfort Township on February 27th, 1842, and who later served as a hero in President Lincoln’s army at the siege of Vicksburg with great distinction. After the end of the Civil War, he married Nancy Matilda McGovney and together the couple brought nine of children into the world. A wearer of many hats in town, John A. Hatch also served as Mokena’s first village clerk upon incorporation in 1880.
Hatch had already been a grain buyer in Mokena before the 1884 fire, and on June 25th of that year, he paid the princely sum of $700 for the site upon which the old elevator had stood, a fee which included the remnants of the original building’s foundation, along with track and wagon scales and some outbuildings that still stood. Construction then began on a new granary, one of the biggest projects in the history of the village up to that point. Piece by piece, it rose over the roofs of Mokena, and when it was finally completed by the beginning of that September, the faithful village correspondent to the Advertiser was given a personal tour of the premises by John Hatch. In the lines of the paper, with great pride in his voice, he reported that:
“All is in readiness to receive grain. The power and shafting have been put in, and ascending to the upper floor we peered down into the depths of eight large bins with chutes accessing two separate elevators, one for oats and one for corn. Everything is handled by machinery, and the turning of two or three levers puts the grain in any part of the building from the basement to the top, or into the cars. In front of the elevator a set of railroad track scales has been put in, and also a set of platform scales has been put it in at the office. Altogether the elevator is complete in every detail. We have reason to be proud of it!”
John A. Hatch kept a thriving business at this location and in the small grain office just west of the elevator, the front door of which opened to Mokena Street. He was still going strong 15 years later, when a November 1899 ad in the Advertiser stated that his firm bought grain and paid the highest market prices, sold hard as well as soft coal, (from which most of the town gained its heat) as well as all kinds of feed and did “grinding on the most reasonable terms.”
The granary of John A. Hatch, seen here around 1900. Mr. Hatch stands in the foreground.
In July 1902, wishing to devote all of his energy to the flourishing general store he also kept in the village, Hatch sold the granary and its associated businesses to William Henry Bechstein of Seneca. While the exact details of the transaction weren’t openly discussed in town, some said that the elevator must’ve changed hands for around $5,000. While Bechstein was late of LaSalle County, he was an old Mokena boy at heart, having been born here of robust agricultural stock on February 13th, 1872, later being wed with Emma Cappel, daughter of a long-established Mokena family in 1895. A former employee of John Hatch’s, W.H. Bechstein was an old hand at the grain business, having been involved in this trade while he lived in Seneca, while a contemporary of his confidently wrote that Bechstein “understands the business from A to Izzard” and that he was “a hustler and a young man of the strictest integrity.” The same writer gushed that the grain man was “genial and obliging, and therefore popular with all. Mokena gains by securing him and his good wife as citizens.”
The name of W.H. Bechstein is one that is writ large in the village’s history. One of the most prominent citizens of Mokena in his day, not only did he run the grain elevator in the early 20th century, he was also one of the founders of the Mokena State Bank in 1909, serving as its first secretary and much later having ascended to the president’s chair. Bechstein was an active Freemason, a dedicated member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church, and was also associated with the village camp of the Modern Woodmen of America. He amassed no small fortune through his business ventures in town, and would also later be remembered as the owner of the first auto in Mokena, a Ford touring car which he purchased in the spring of 1912.
Towards the end of 1903, after having had ownership for a little over a year, W.H. Bechstein set out to improve the elevator. First, he had a new roof put on the massive structure, then ordered a new 12,000 pound hopper scale for use in weighing grain into railroad cars. By the end of February 1904, Bechstein’s concern was also the proud new owner of a six horse power gas fueled engine. The next year, a fresh business venture enticed the agriculturist back to Seneca, where he purchased a large share in another grain firm. Back in Mokena, the spring of 1905 saw the elevator rented to none other than John A. Hatch, who set forth grinding feed with his adolescent son Alfred. In November of that year, W.H. Bechstein formally sold the elevator along with its grain and coal business to Frank and Charles Liess, two Mokena brothers who also kept a general store on Front Street. They spent a total of $7,500, which included not only the stock on hand, but also figured in Bechstein’s recent improvements to the property. The Liesses had already dabbled in grain in our neck of the woods by this time, but were hindered by the fact that up to this point, they had no storage buildings to speak of.
Alas, the Liess chapter of the granary’s history is a brief one. As history often returns to familiar faces, our old friend W.H. Bechstein and is family moved back from Seneca to their old Mokena stomping grounds after only having been away for three years. On the crisp first day of 1908, papers were signed and Bechstein re-acquired the granary with its coal and feed business, and was soon back in action. By the end of the month, things were humming to such a degree that one Friday night, the machinery in the elevator was kept running until well past midnight, filling railroad cars with shelled corn. A man with an eye for betterment, Bechstein also had the elevator painted red in this era.
The grain elevator during the W.H. Bechstein years, circa 1910.
The granary was a focal point for our farmers, and a place from which a good chunk of their income came. A typical case would be that of Dan Lauffer, who sold his first batch of oats for the 1910 season to Bechstein, and received 33 cents per bushel. Things were especially good for farmers six years later, when upon shipping the season’s first load of corn to the Chicago market in November 1916, Bechstein paid the highest price for the crop in Mokena since the Civil War, a hefty dollar a bushel to Conrad Bettenhausen.
For the second time in the elevator’s history, the terror of fire struck again. On Sunday morning, November 5th, 1916, Elmer Cooper, a newly minted garage owner, saw smoke pouring out of a barn that was near the granary. It was known that a horse was trapped inside, and local auctioneer Herbert Moriarty was the first on the scene to try to rescue the helpless animal, but was beat back by the dense clouds of smoke. The horse, badly burned and asphyxiated, was eventually dragged from the burning barn with a rope. A Frankfort veterinarian was summoned, but nothing could be done for the poor beast, who died that night.
While World War I was being waged overseas, its effect was also being felt in Mokena. In January 1918, the village was in the grip of a pronounced coal shortage, that also coincided with one of the worst blizzards in the community’s history. With hardly any coal to be had from local dealers, some residents were taking to soaking old ashes in their stoves with oil to gain their heat. Not wanting to leave his fellow town folk in the lurch, W.H. Bechstein took to selling wood cut to stove size to his customers in this time frame, which was better than no fuel at all. By February things had gotten a little better, but still weren’t quite where they should’ve been. On the morning of the first of the month Bechstein received a railroad car’s worth of soft coal, and by noon, it was all gone, after having been parsed out to 75 customers.
After having been in business at this old Mokena location for a combined total of 21 years, W.H. Bechstein had paid his dues and was ready to rest open his laurels. On August 7th, 1926 he sold the elevator and its concerns to his brothers in law, Fred and Albert Cappel. They had much in common with Bechstein, as the two brothers, aside from being his kin, were also born into an old Mokena family that had much to do with the building up of the village. In Albert Cappel’s youth, he had also been an employee of Bechstein’s at the elevator. As their predecessors did, Cappel Bros. handled grain, feed, as well as salt and tile, not to mention the all-important coal to boot. The latter they were known to deliver house to house, a service that yet a handful of Mokenians can still remember. A 1928 appendix of Mokena businesses called Fritz Cappel, as he was known, a “live, progressive man” in the village, while the same authority called his younger brother “one of the prominent young business men” in town.
A 1929 advertisement for the local business of Fred and Albert Cappel.
Cappel Bros. steered their business through the hard years of the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, the elevator went through a succession of hands, including the partnership of Robert Hohenstein and Harold Schuldt, who bought the granary from the Cappels in the first days of 1946. By the time of their tenure, the old elevator was starting to show its age, so a new aluminum roof was put on and the sides of gargantuan building were clad in steel, which is still in place to this day. At the time of these improvements, it was noted that the elevator had a capacity of 15,000 bushels of grain. In this timeframe, the old grain office just west of the elevator was pulled down and replaced by a bigger, steel-sided building.
A new page in the history of this time-honored property was turned when Robert Niemann sold the elevator in 1966 to Chester and Dorothy Ebert. Chet, as he was known by more than a few around town, has a place in Mokena’s history that is just as venerated as John Hatch and W.H. Bechstein’s. A true son of the soil, he was born in August 1918 on a farm in Frankfort Township that stood on today’s St. Francis Road. After his family moved further north to a different farm north of the current intersection of 191st Street and 88th Avenue, as a lad he went to school at the old one room Summit Hill schoolhouse, and later became an alumni of Mokena’s two year high school. Like so many others of this Greatest Generation, Chet Ebert rose to our country’s defense during the Second World War, having served the duration in the Army Air Corps, spending nearly three years in Panama.
Chester Ebert, far right, inspecting a corn crop in September 1963. (image courtesy of Ruth Welzen)
In the years after the war, Ebert was no stranger to business in our community, and was already a familiar face here when the elevator came into his family’s hands in the 1960s. As early as 1946, he started a concern in a simple building just east of the grain elevator, selling limestone to area farmers, which they used to enrich their soil. In 1950, Chet Ebert took on Warren Mancke of Tinley Park as a business partner for a brief period and expanded into a phosphate service, becoming a pioneer in this line. Phosphate was favored by local agriculturists who valued it for its use as a fertilizer, who would receive it delivered by Ebert, who would also spread it in their fields. To accommodate his growing business, the same year Chet Ebert had a large storage bin built just to the east of the grain elevator, it measuring 25 feet high by 16 feet in diameter, with a respectful capacity of 175 tons.
Aside from being a successful Mokena businessman, Ebert wore many hats in town as a respected local leader, having a seat on the boards of Immanuel Lutheran church, Mokena Public School, the Will County Farm Bureau, as well as the village board of trustees from 1969 to 1973. In conjunction with the phosphate business, he also founded Ebert Farm Service, which for many years operated out of the steel-clad building on Mokena Street immediately west of the grain elevator. A wide array of products could be had here, all reflective of the needs of Mokenians in this era. A 1976 ad listed everything from “feed, seed, grain, fertilizer and horse supplies” to “lawn and garden supplies”, making the store truly a one-stop shop for villagers.
The grain elevator and Ebert Farm Service on Mokena Street, as they appeared in the 1970s. (image courtesy of Ruth Welzen)
The family business reached into the end of the 20th century, when Chet Ebert’s daughter Ruth, and her husband Dave Welzen, took over the former Ebert Farm Service in 1981 and re-christened it The Feed Bucket, to let Mokenians know that the concern was under new ownership. The Welzens started out primarily selling livestock feed, which would come to town on pallets, which would be stacked inside the now century-old grain elevator. Live ducks, geese and turkeys were also for sale here, along with baby chicks, which a visitor to the store would find in wooden crates bathed in golden light.
The era in which The Feed Bucket existed, was a time of great change for Mokena. With the population climbing to astronomical heights, the village was rapidly changing from the rural farm town it had been for generations to a Chicago suburb. By the 1990s, Main Street America was in decline as big box stores made their headway into our environs. One of the many casualties of this unfortunate development was The Feed Bucket, which ultimately shut its doors on Mokena Street in 1996.
Today we can look back over a century and half of history at this storied location. Most of the figures that make up the long narrative of this landmark we can only see through the hazy eye of memory. Their contributions to our community were great, and they deserve our dearest reverence. The grain elevator still stands triumphant, a monument to their love, work and lives in Mokena.
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