Never before or since, has our land seen such a trying time as the Civil War. With our nation torn asunder, it was a period of great meaning not only for the entire country, but also for our village. Dozens of Mokena’s men and boys were marching in Abraham Lincoln’s army and facing danger every day, while our community was paying a heavy price to preserve the Union. Local souls were heavy. A great letting of blood was happening in far off fields, and one summer day a tumult came to our door that was just as great an atrocity as anything seen at the front. On August 15th, 1864, a taste of the war came to our village.
The Man in the Middle
At the center of this story stands a man named Johann Georg Adam Schiek. Born to this world on June 1st, 1825, Schiek first saw earthly light in a modestly sized village called Neckarbischofsheim, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Today a part of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, this region of gentle hills, small villages and green countryside was the home of Johann’s parents, Heinrich and Rosina Schiek. Including himself, Johann was one of 11 children born to the couple; by all means a large family, but one not unusual in its time and place. A hearty farmer, the elder Schiek would have surely counted on young Johann’s help in the fields during planting and harvest.
What was already a rough and grueling life took a turn for the worse in the late 1840s. During Johann’s young adulthood, Europe was thrown into violent revolution. By 1848, brutal political turmoil was widespread in most of the German-speaking world, and in the ensuing uprisings, countless protesters were killed across the continent. Later generations would claim that the elder Schiek was a revolutionary, and like many of his countrymen who found themselves in a dangerous position when the tide turned against them, he fled Baden with his family in tow.
Along with his parents and siblings, Johann Schiek first set foot in the United States in August 1848. Upon their arrival, the immigrant family found their way to Chicago, where a sojourn of several days was made. From this Midwestern metropolis, the Schieks set forth into a dense wilderness of prairies, negotiating rough terrain by foot the entire way, and camping in the open during the nights. The family eventually reached Joliet, and soon after, made their permanent home on the site of today’s Mokena.
Having in 1848 been the home to settlers of European descent for a short 17 years, Johann Schiek would have fit in well with his few neighbors; as the yet unnamed township was already being settled by many pioneers of German birth. Heretofore Frankfort Township had been home to roughly a dozen families of eastern American origin, hailing from such places as New York, Ohio, and Vermont. The 1840s heralded an ethnic shift in this portion of eastern Will County, with most new arrivals to the vast wilderness of the area being of Germanic descent, the majority of them being Bavarians and Hessians, geographic neighbors to the Schiek’s Baden home. So strong was the German influence on the area, that according to early Will County historian George Woodruff, an early Teuton settler named the township for his Hessian home, Frankfurt am Main.
With the birth of Mokena in 1852, the young man soon found an opportunity for profit in the new rural community; establishing an inn in the rural locale within several years of its start. An early Will County directory first records Schiek’s establishment, the Western Hotel, in 1859. J.H. Quinn, a federal census taker who visited Mokena on July 3rd, 1860, recorded five male laborers residing in Schiek’s hostelry, possibly employees of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Having by this time Americanized his name to John Schiek, he and his wife Helena, along with their four young children, were well known in the new community. Schiek’s place in Mokena was respected by his friends and neighbors, one later mentioning that his “energy was equaled by his business veracity”.
This era marked the end of the last semblance of normalcy that Mokena and the rest of America would see for the next five years. The Civil War loomed ominously on the horizon, and Schiek and his contemporaries were entering a time of great carnage and despair. In 1864, it would reach a highpoint in Mokena.
Mokena, 1864 AD
In the summer of 1864, as the Civil War raged for its third bloody year, Mokena was a relatively newborn community located 11 miles from Joliet on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Although settlers of European descent had populated the immediate region for just over three decades at this time, the unincorporated hamlet had first been platted in 1852 with arrival of the railroad. Consisting of a few streets and perhaps a couple hundred residents, Mokena was a small, rural town surrounded by a lush agricultural region.
Along rustic 1864 Front Street, residents patronized such business houses as the general store of James Ducker, a native of England who was one of the Mokena’s most successful merchants, along with the modern shop of Teutonic-born Conrad Stoll. Fellow countryman Moritz Weiss kept a well-stocked drug store. The saloon of Martin Heim, a native Hessian, was known to quench the thirst of railroad workers, and a steam-powered sawmill at the tracks catered to the needs of the steadily growing town. The hum of work at a flourmill had even started, but carried on for only a short time before the building burned in 1860.
Two blocks north of muddy Front Street (often simply referred to as Main Street by locals) stood a wide, sunny expanse of ground set aside for schools and churches. Known as the Public Square, the wooden frame church edifice of the German United Evangelical St. John’s congregation stood here. A few rods to the west of the modest church stood a small, one room schoolhouse; one of Mokena’s first proper buildings, having been built nine years previous.
The area was the home to a fair share of abolitionists in this era. Allen Denny, a New Yorker by birth who in 1864 would have been nearing his 75th year, was an early settler and one of the region’s well-known residents, as well as being the founder of Mokena proper. Denny kept a station on the Underground Railroad near town, and even found himself indicted under Illinois’s fugitive slave laws.
Patriotic fervor was high. Having furnished at least 50 men to the Union army to combat the rebel hordes since the Civil War’s start, Mokena could boast at this time of sons, brothers and friends in the ranks of the 20th, 64th, and 100th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiments. A devastating blow was dealt to the small community on September 19th, 1863, when three of its sons were killed in the Battle of Chickamauga in northwestern Georgia, a fight of unspeakable horror that was second only to Gettysburg in terms of body count.
By 1864, America was in the midst of vast bloodshed and tragedy, the intensity of which the land had not seen before or since. Although far removed from the front lines of war, the most violent period of our nation’s history begat one of the most terrible events in Mokena’s history. In the summer of 1864, a firestorm of ferocity struck Mokena that exploded across headlines of newspapers as far away as Chicago.
“A Carnival of Blood”
The summer day of August 15th, 1864 found a long train coasting along the rails of the Rock Island toward Joliet. Filling several coaches that day was a large band of merry makers, all of whom en route to Cold Spring Grove, about seven miles outside the county seat. They were members of the St. Louis conference of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a Catholic charity based in Chicago. Upon reaching their destination, a grand picnic was held, and much fun was had by the day-trippers and their families. After a day of high spirits and jollity, all were in a good mood, and with the outbreak of evening and casting of shadows, the time slowly came to re-board the train to their Chicago homes.
Predominantly a group of Irish immigrants and those otherwise of Celtic heritage, alcoholic beverages has been flowing in copious amounts that day at Cold Spring Grove, and by all accounts, a party atmosphere had continued in the train on the way back north. After traversing a fair amount of miles and leaving Joliet far behind them, the locomotive slowly lurched to a halt at about 5:15pm. Word made its way through the cars that they were stopped on a siding, giving the right of way to another passing train. If the passengers peered out the windows, they would have seen some houses, stores, and if they were positioned just right, possibly a church spire or two. They were in Mokena.
With no signs emerging of a quick continuance to their journey, the more uproarious of the train’s passengers began to grow restless.
By and by, the passengers came to leave the cars and wander out into Mokena. The first inkling of trouble that evening began at Moritz Weiss’s drugstore. Mr. Weiss stood in the doorway of his shop, comfortably smoking his Meerschaum pipe and taking in the hour, when 10 or 12 of the alcohol-fortified Chicagoans came to him, and brusquely demanded more grog. He explained to them that he was a pharmacist and didn’t keep any, when one of the toughs rudely plucked the pipe from his lips and proceeded to brutally kick him in the shin. This made the druggist’s “blood boil”, who responded by punching the hoodlum in the stomach, who was bowled over by the impact. Moritz Weiss hurriedly called out to his wife Julia to bring him his shotgun, and as she appeared with the gun, the ruffians beat a hasty retreat.
Meanwhile, another drama was brewing a few doors down at John Schiek’s Western Hotel. Around fifteen or twenty excursionists, or possibly as many as fifty, left the cars and stumbled through the railroad yard, across a narrow dirt road, and into the inn. They had one goal, and that was the procuring of more booze.
Responding to their calls for drink, Schiek served the glut of unexpected customers a round. Glasses tilted back, foamy liquid was consumed, and merriment continued for the time being. Schiek was quickly confronted with a problem, that being that he had more customers than he had glassware. This, combined with the fact that the revelers were already calling for more, prompted the innkeeper to ask for payment for the first round before he would make good with a second. To their Irish ears, Schiek’s request in his Teutonic voice led the inebriated and confused visitors to take the decree as an ethnic affront. In their stupor, the Chicagoans made no haste in escalating the situation, venting their anger and ransacking the Western Hotel in response. Shards of glass and splinters of wood filled the air as chairs and bottles were smashed, and the bar’s counter was overturned.
In shock and anger at the destruction of his property, John Schiek dashed upstairs and fetched a revolver, partly in self -defense and also to frighten the disorderly group into leaving. At this point in the episode, certain aspects of the historic narrative become foggy and unclear. What is clear, is that Schiek was then joined by an armed assistant or two, at least one of which was a Union soldier on furlough. They set out to clear the inn by force. The mob beat a hasty retreat under the Mokenians’ guns, and upon congregating in Front Street, began to pelt the Western Hotel with rocks and logs. The rioters gained help at this juncture, for some would later claim that several women emerged out of the stalled train, cradling hefty rocks in their aprons that had been picked up in New Lenox, handing them off to the men in their group.
The glass in his windows being no match for the angry, drunken crush, Schiek, his assistant, plus another acquaintance took up a defense stance in the inn’s doorway. Sometime between the initial retreat from Schiek’s establishment and the episode in the street, a shot was fired, and one of the mob was wounded. The depths of time have clouded which party pulled the trigger first, but it mattered for naught - the Mokenians were by now indiscriminately firing from the door. Whizzing through the night air, the lead balls found their marks, although some accounts would say that many of the rounds went high and found their place in the railroad coaches. Under this withering fire, the rabblers rallied and stormed the inn, overwhelming Schiek and his friends.
John Schiek made a run for the back door, hoping to escape to a nearby forest, but to his horror, the building was now surrounded by the angry horde. According to one account, a “shower of stones, brickbats and missiles of every description” kept him trapped in his place. Joined by his two compatriots, who by this time had fired over 70 shots and had no more rounds between them, Schiek and the men eventually fled into the night. A few days later, it was reckoned that they were up against an angry, booze-fueled mob of about 100 to 150 men. Schiek was unable to escape the angry masses. They caught him, ruthlessly pummeled him with their fists, and proceeded to steal his revolver and the cash from his pockets, leaving him as an unconscious, crumbled heap in the darkness.
Eventually a second train of the day’s Chicagoan revelers arrived in Mokena, and with the initial group of ruffians, a number of them began to set to work further tearing apart the Western Hotel. In essence, the building was gutted, witnesses would later report that the house was almost completely obliterated from the Mokena streetscape. One account from shortly after the riot called the house “nothing more than a ruin.” A calculated and wanton destruction of the worst sort was inflicted; everything of value in John Schiek’s establishment was ruined. His doors were broken up, partitions were torn apart, all his glasses had been shattered, ten boxes of cigars were looted, and between twenty and thirty dollars (roughly $335 to $500 in today’s value) were taken from Schiek’s cash drawer. A grim coup de grace was also nearly dealt. Some of the group, yelling “burn down the damned place!” piled kindling against the Western Hotel in order to immolate the building, although they were ultimately thwarted by the cries of an elderly woman in a neighboring house to spare the buildings.
At the height of the riot, John Schiek wasn’t the only Mokenian who felt the wrath of the drunken horde. Their rage fanned out in all directions surrounding the Western Hotel: Private residents would later report their homes having been plundered, and lastly, it was whispered that some of the offenders also attempted to stone one of John Schiek’s young children to death.
As the awful tumult was taking place at Schiek’s, a sidebar to the grisly affair was taking place at the nearby grocery store of Conrad Stoll. He would recall that Mokena was in over its head from the get-go, as within 10 minutes of the first train arriving, “the saloons and stores across from (it) were filled to the brim with the Chicago bandits.” He estimated that about 100 or 150 squeezed and hoarded into his place of business, and demanded brandy and whisky, which Stoll didn’t carry. The crowd left his place under a cloud of “horrible curses” and proceeded to begin their storming of John Schiek’s inn.
Conrad Stoll wasn’t out of the woods yet. Another mob “jumped in masses from the cars” and crowded him to his eyeballs, and demanded candy, cakes, coffee, cigars, “simply everything they could see”, he’d say. He and two others were working the counter, but he estimated that they wouldn’t be paid a tenth for what they gave to the unwelcomed customers. Wanton stealing was the order of the evening. Stoll’s display cases were ripped open and pilfered. As the storekeeper reached his wit’s end and shouted that he’d be forced to grab his gun, Stoll’s brave wife, Franciska, was aiding her husband by attempting to physically force some of the crush out of the building. Conrad Stoll’s words from shortly thereafter echo repeatedly as “they took everything they could get their hands on” and “all (my) begging helped for nothing”; an illustrative example being the thieves who filled their pockets with sugar and tobacco, and the 18 hats that the Stolls lost, along with glasses, pitchers, buckets, and stone crocks.
As he was forking over a handful of cigars to the mob, a hand reached out to give Conrad Stoll a dollar bill. As he made the change, “a big rogue fell over the drawer” and snatched three 10-dollar bills and some coins, amounting to at least $500 in today’s money. Now was the time for Stoll to regain his footing and pull together a semblance of control over the situation. He grabbed a menacing cheese knife, held the drawer shut with his other hand, and fought off the rowdy. “I threatened to stab everybody who wouldn’t leave the store immediately” he breathlessly reported shortly thereafter. A new problem arose, however, when the mass found their way behind his house, attacked his summer kitchen, and carried off everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Meanwhile, some fellow Mokenians came to his rescue, and as they helped Conrad Stoll barricade his shop, the villagers witnessed the chaos nearby at John Schiek’s, “as hundreds stood at John Schiek’s house and bombarded it with rocks, when all the windows and doors were turned to rubble.” He recounted the gunfire coming from inside the saloon directed at the drunken mob, saying simply that it was “a horrible picture.” Stoll mentioned little bands of villains who ran back and forth through town, who at one point, absconded with his 15-year-old son from behind his house and went on to “beat him like barbarians”. Luckily the young man was able to climb back into his house through an open window.
As this was transpiring, Conrad Stoll had grabbed his double-barreled shotgun, loaded it with buckshot, and took up a post in a window in the second floor of his building.
Leaving Mokena tattered, smashed, pillaged, and in pieces, a locomotive’s shrill steam whistle sounded in the evening hour, and the drunken mass beat a hasty retreat from town and back to the cars, carrying their bloody wounded with them after the fray at the Western Hotel. Seemingly as quickly as they stormed onto the scene, their trains disappeared into the prairie, and back to Chicago. With an extremely agitated and bloodthirsty mood still prevailing amongst them upon their arrival in the Garden City, a contingent of the day’s revelers set upon ravaging a saloon near their terminus station. Luckily, a concerned police officer intervened, warning the mob sternly that “a squad of soldiers was in sight”, and they desisted their brutal work.
Sheltered Mokenians cautiously emerged from their hiding places, and the local injured were nursed to their senses. That night, all able-bodied men in the village stood watch, armed to the teeth and nervously staring down every train that passed through. The day’s carnage in Mokena was just the beginning in the grim affair.
(Check back next Friday for the conclusion to this story)
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