Within our village gates, there was once a man known as the Colonel, with his flowing silver locks, sparkling blue eyes and snow-white beard, who made a name for himself by wearing suits of buckskin and ten-gallon hats. He was able to recite Shakespeare by memory, was called “beloved and colorful”, and those who made his acquaintance said this gentleman had a “high intellect” and “kindly disposition.” Once a generation there comes a larger-than-life character, a personality that is truly one of a kind, and Colonel Don C. Hall was ours, a true Mokena original.
A forgotten idyll: Col. and Mrs. Don C. Hall pose at the village outskirts around 1940.
Don Carlos Hall entered this world on March 6th, 1867 at Eau Pleine in central Wisconsin, the son of William and Anna Hall, his father a farmer turned lumberman and his mother a school teacher. At a very early age in the boy’s life, the Halls packed up and moved to the Dakota Territory, which in those days still counted as the wild, untamed west. In later years, Don C. Hall would claim to have been at the scene in Deadwood, as a nine-year-old, when the legendary Wild Bill Hickock met his untimely end, as well as being at his funeral. Taking this story into consideration, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Hall had a bend for the grandiose, and that there is no way to verify this tale. In any case, at his future home in Mokena, he exhibited an old pair of knee-high boots that he proclaimed were worn by Hickock at the time of his ultimate demise, which, as the tale went, he received as a gift from Hickock’s acquaintance Calamity Jane shortly before she died in 1903.
In time, the Halls found their way back to Wisconsin, this time to Stevens Point, a logging town in the central part of the state not far from Don C. Hall’s birthplace. The young man was said to have gotten his education in “the rugged school of experience”, and would at one point study bookkeeping. However, the lad’s heart belonged to the theater, and here at a young age, he began to make his career. Hall’s biggest passion were Shakespearian roles, for which his heart would beat for the rest of his days.
In January 1888, aged not quite 21, Don C. Hall took Clara Alice Crocker as his wife, a young lady almost a year his senior. They tied the knot at Crocker’s Landing, Wisconsin, the bride’s familial home. Clara would be remembered as a “wonderful character, lovable, always cheerful and never seeing the dark side of life.” The new married couple cut quite a figure together, as contemporaries described Clara as “diminutive”, while they described her husband as “tall and stately.” One admirer would later write that the Halls “were an inspiration to all who knew them.’
Don and Clara Hall carved out a living in theater, coming to form the Don C. Hall Company, with which they traveled and performed all over the United States, visiting every state at least once with the exception of Maine. Eventually the company came to have two railroad coaches at their disposal with which they crisscrossed America. The Halls welcomed three children into their lives, Don Carlos Jr, Walter Richard, and Inez Olivet, who came into the world between 1888 and 1895, all of whom were born on the road while the family was on tour.
The company contained versatile actors, as Clara Hall would state that they performed “comedy, drama, melodrama, tragedy…and just about anything else the public wants.” Among many others, they were known to stage such works as Enoch Arden and Ten Nights In a Bar Room, while husband and wife also came to pen their own pieces, including a drama based on Shakespeare’s Richard III. During the great Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, the Halls called a theater on Halsted Street home, where they put on Rudolph the Cripple during the fair. By 1900, the Don C. Hall Company boasted of around 20 to 40 thespians and musicians.
His career as a dramatist went on hold for a short time in 1913, when Don C. Hall was elected to the Wisconsin state legislature on the Republican ticket from Portage County. He held the seat for six years, during which time he was also an unsuccessful candidate for state governor, and also claimed to have rubbed elbows with Theodore Roosevelt. During Hall’s time politicking, he picked up the honorific title of Colonel, bestowed upon him by state senator Robert La Follette. The moniker would stick with Hall for the rest of his life. When the Colonel set his heart to something, he gave it his all. While he wouldn’t become a professional politician, government was something that always remained dear to him.
A new venture came to the Colonel in the tumultuous years of the First World War. By way of a gentleman from Milwaukee, Hall first heard of a coveted Seminole herb called Conyagada, which the tribesmen purported to be medicinal; a cure for just about everything. Knowing a business opportunity when he saw one, the Colonel searched out the Seminole in the Florida Everglades, and after some initial distrust on their part, they eventually warmed up to the actor politician, and taught him how to distill the root of the Conyagada plant, from which Hall made a tonic. Having gained the proper know-how, he returned to Wisconsin and won a license from the state to operate a still in which the tonic was manufactured.
So it was, that for around a decade, the Hall family once again traveled to every far-flung corner of America selling the remedy, complete with trucks bearing platforms that unfolded, upon which the medicine shows were staged. Don C. Hall Jr mingled in the assembled crowds with a box full of the product strapped on his back, seeking out customers. One of the Colonel’s sales barks was “Seminole Indian Conyagada rubbing oil for aches, pains, cuts, bruises, headache, earache, toothache, neuralgia.” Years after the show had closed up business, the root still remained a favored remedy in the Hall family.
It came to pass that in 1923, the medicine show was on the road in Will County, and one of its trucks gave up the ghost in Frankfort. Little would they know it, but this would prove to be a fortuitous moment loaded with consequence for Colonel and Mrs. Hall, as a golden path led them to Mokena, the site of their future home. In those days a steel water tower rose over Front Street, which was lined with businesses such as Al Braun’s blacksmith shop, George Wannemacher’s soft drink parlor, the Cooper & Hostert Ford Agency, Krapp Bros. Mokena Hardware Company, along with the village’s two-story, wood frame public school. Barely three years before, the community was home to 475 souls. Called by some (with tongues firmly in cheek) the purveyors of snake oil, the Halls moved into a building owned by the Hatch family on Mokena Street, a place that for most its life had been a general store, but as of late had been a hall.
One of the Halls’ first acts upon getting settled in Mokena was to subscribe to the News-Bulletin, our erstwhile village newspaper. They quickly became enamored with the jaunty small-town publication, and in later years it would be remembered that their affection for it was a main reason for their deciding to set down roots in town.
When they weren’t on the road doing business, the Halls got settled in our community and were accepted by the village at large. Their tradition as great thespians continued in their new home, because while Stratford-upon-Avon may have had Shakespeare, Mokena had the Halls. Among other pieces, they presented the play Davy Crockett in four acts at the end of April 1924, their stage being the empty lot at the southeast corner of Denny Avenue and Mokena Street. After putting down stakes here, Colonel and Mrs. Hall, along with their adult son Don Jr., moved to a quaint cottage on Third Street. The walls of its living room were covered in old newspaper, which gave the whole space a golden shine. The couple, now getting on in years, were friendly with neighborhood children, and Clara Hall could be counted on to treat young visitors to cookies.
This cozy house at today's 11120 Third Street is one of the several places the Halls called home in Mokena.
Colonel Don C. Hall was a sharp political commentator, and took up his old mantle of politics in his new Illinois home. When the abysmal condition of Mokena’s roads was a thorny political topic in the interwar era, the Colonel would be remembered as an advocate for their improvement and took a major role with other prominent Mokenians in the campaign to get Wolf Road concreted in in that time. In 1934 he ran for state senator, during which time our News-Bulletin confidently said that “he can and should win.” Unfortunately, voters saw it differently. Unwavered by defeat, at Christmastime 1939 Colonel Hall announced his candidacy for another office; setting his sights even higher by tossing his hat into the ring on the Republican ticket for US senator. Championing the campaign slogan “A Wage for Age”, the focal point of his policies was an old age pension program. Once again, he was shot down at the polls.
Husband and wife were avid travelers, even while not doing drama or selling patent medicine. When taking to the open road, they left behind their sales truck and didn’t touch the steel rails of the Rock Island line, instead always preferring to go by hitching rides. Before the sun had set on their lives, Colonel and Mrs. Hall had blazed a trail over just about every inch of the land by hitchhiking. Once in December 1936, they completed a trip from Dallas to Mokena in 38 hours, all by thumb, having completed the whole route in only three rides. The trek was considered a record, and was proudly reported from the front page of Mokena’s News-Bulletin. A few years later, the Colonel went on the record, saying “we have splendid luck. I think we can safely say our longest walk in a day was twelve miles.” He was known to tote about 60 pounds in two bags, while Clara Hall carried a wicker handbag. At the end of the 1930s, the Halls humbly claimed to have 25,000 to 30,000 miles under their belts in three years alone.
The two had a knack for making a name for themselves, and in 1933, they became Mokena’s representatives at the historically unforgettable Century of Progress, Chicago’s second World’s Fair. At the Days of ’49 exhibit, in which visitors immersed themselves in the lives of prospectors in a Gold Rush camp, Colonel Don C. Hall played the mayor of Gold Gulch, the role he was born for. While performing at the fair, the Colonel’s past as a medicine salesman was also played up. The Days of ’49 had its own newspaper, the masthead of which read The Gold Gulch Self-Cocker, which highlighted the Mokenian, painting the perfect picture:
“Dr. Hall, the medicine man… is in Gold Gulch and has been entertaining our people with quips and gests, occasionally dropping into poetic verse interspersing his lectures on the subject of health. He claims to cure everything from a broken heart to a disordered liver and to relieve one of tape worm any length desired. See the Doctor before you die – he will at least cheer you up on your journey across.”
Both Colonel and Clara Hall were known to wear pioneer garb around Mokena, such as the fringed buckskin suits that the gent sported. One of his main claims to fame was his uncanny, double-take inducing lookalike to Buffalo Bill Cody. Hall was instantly recognizable by his resplendent silver mane, he once having told a reporter for the Herald-News that he last cut his hair in 1873 at the tender age of six.
Clara and Col. Don C. Hall seen at the Mokena Fall Fest of 1944. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)
Don C. Hall became a talented author of logs describing he and his wife’s travels, always filing detailed reports in the News-Bulletin on the various events that they visited all over the country. In 1936, the Halls were Texas bound, where the Colonel opened the centennial fair’s Pioneer Days show, and then in 1939, they hitchhiked back-to-back to the Golden Gate International Exposition held in San Francisco as well as to the World’s Fair of that year held in New York City. At the latter place, the two received press credentials, where a media correspondent from the Big Apple was especially taken by his appearance, penning “cultured and witty, the Colonel wore a ten-gallon hat, a white tie and a long black morning frock with cloth-covered buttons.” In a wink to our Mokena editor Bill Semmler, Hall wrote in his notes from San Francisco: “Will visit the press department again today and will have your card with me(,) and you may know that they will know the News-Bulletin before we leave them. Mokena has scored again. We never neglect the old home town.” It was later estimated that the Halls were the most photographed couple at both fairs.
When, in 1945, Norma Lee Browning of the Chicago Tribune came to Mokena to pen her tasty booklet Mokena Memorabilia, she inevitably crossed paths with Colonel and Mrs. Hall. She noted their advanced age, but marked their drive to keep hitchhiking, quoting the pair “Once you give up and sit down, you just wither away.” In rounding out her piece on their impressive lives, Browning wrote that “Together they have devoted their life to drama, temperance and hitchhiking.”
The Halls were invited to the Chicago Railroad Fair in the summer of 1949, and once there, they didn’t have a specific program to follow, a reporter simply stated that they “wore their western “get ups” around to create atmosphere.” At this time they also staged productions in Joliet and Chicago schools, with the Colonel lecturing on “The Spirit of the West”, as his words were acted out on stage by Clara Hall, clad in gingham and bonnet. In 1950, the Joliet Spectator profiled the couple, calling them “a pair of congenial old troopers” who had “fallen in love with the stage and the West at an early age and can’t get either out of their systems.” Despite the years behind them, the Colonel “still want(ed) it made known in no uncertain terms that he and his wife are still showmen ready for a job.”
The Halls of Mokena, seen here in 1950. The Colonel is sporting the purported Wild Bill Hickok boots.
In their later years, the Halls settled into a cozy little house on Bonness Avenue, where they spent the sunset of their lives, receiving friends, well-wishers, and curious media figures to the last. Clara Hall passed away in Mokena on August 8th, 1951, at which point the Colonel went to live with their son Don Jr in Mississippi. The siren call of home brought him back to us soon thereafter in the summer of 1953. So it was that on Halloween 1953, Colonel Don C. Hall peacefully breathed his last at a Joliet nursing home. His passing came as a great shock in our village, as he hadn’t been ill.
People are what make the community. They are forever associated with their place, the scene of their labors and love. They are the irreplaceable pieces of fabric that make up our greater narrative. To know the Halls, is to know Mokena.
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