The Currency of Time: The Early Days of Mokena State Bank

   Money makes the world go ‘round. While our streets have never been paved with gold, we’ve had a tidy financial institution within our village gates for well over a century that safeguards the treasures of our town folk. Weathering safe crackings, robberies, and global financial crises, it’s still with us to this day. What merged with the State Bank of Illinois in the first decade of the 21^st century, was originally the Mokena State Bank, which found its beginning in the summer of 1909. 

   While the institution has been around for as long as any of us can remember, it is not the first bank to exist in town. 25 years before anyone even dreamt of Mokena State Bank, the Mokena Exchange Bank was on the scene. Time has not been kind, and the narrative of this institution has proven impossible to reconstruct through the fog of the ages. It’s hazily remembered that it was in the hands of father and son Ozias and Erwin McGovney for a time, and that future Mokena mayor and Chicago Board of Trade man Noble Jones was running it in 1882, when a failed attempt to dynamite the safe shocked the community. Sometime in those last two decades of the 19^th century it went defunct, and nearly every trace of it was swept away by the ebb and flow of time. 

 

   At the dawn of 1900, Mokena found itself in something of a slump, with a mere 281 people living in the village proper at the time. Eastern Will County was still reeling after the nationwide Panic of 1893, which led many Mokena people and businesses to seek greener pastures. An increase in railroad commerce in the younger towns of Alpine, Marley and Orland Park that normally would have come our way also didn’t help matters, and neither did the lack of good roads in our neck of the woods. Starting in the autumn of 1907, Mokena underwent a rebound, first with the opening of the Bowman Dairy Company’s bottling plant on today’s Wolf Road, and then with the first inkling of a new bank in our neighborhood. 

 

   The roots of Mokena State Bank were planted as early as October 1907, when the state auditor issued a permit to Fred Ehlers, an enterprising merchant from Grant Park in Kankakee County, to form a bank in our village. Whatever his connection was to Mokena and his reasons for going into commerce here have long since been forgotten, but it stands on the historical record that he took three of our businessmen with him in the venture. However, the state of the economy was still a bit shaky at the time, and not totally conducive to establishing a bank, as William Semmler, Mokena’s correspondent to the Joliet Weekly News noted that a “financial stringency” was abounding in our midst. He went on to detail that “the people around here have not much faith in bank scripts and other bank paper money that is issued, so it is declared, will not accept any such money at any rate.” As such, the bank project went to sleep for a while. 

 

   It sprung back to life a little over a year later, when another mystery man came onto the scene. A Chicago attorney by the name of H. Gilbrath engaged himself promoting a state bank in Mokena. Over those last few weeks of 1908, the idea was looked upon quite favorably by village folk. Optimism was in the air, and in reporting on the developments for the Weekly News, William Semmler wrote 

 

“Our business people and prominent citizens, as well as dairy farmers have come to the conclusion that a bank in this town would not only greatly improve business facilities, but will also benefit the town, and as we hope, prove to be a stepping stone to future worthy enterprises.”

 

   Stock in this new institution was being subscribed for at such speed, that just before Christmas it was confidently declared that “For its size, the bank will be one of the strongest in the county.” The local investors set their calendars for their first meeting on Saturday, January 2^nd, 1909. On a day filled with meaning, they chose 55-year-old Christian Bechstein as the first president of the Mokena State Bank. For many years a LaPorte Road agriculturist but lately a resident of the village, Bechstein had a seven-year term as mayor behind him when he took the president’s chair. He remained captain at the bank’s helm until the day he passed away in 1924. Filling the vice president’s position was George Cooper, member of prominent local farming family, while the secretary’s spot was taken by local grain merchant William H. Bechstein; President Bechstein’s nephew. Rounding them out was the youngest of the group, 31-year-old Frank Liess, who became cashier, a position akin to a modern teller. A further ten men were chosen for the new bank’s board of directors. 

 

   In early 1909, the new bank’s building committee was working on plans for their brand-new structure, and had engaged an architect named John Ahlschlager to draw up the plans. While he was a resident of Chicago, Ahlschlager had grown up on a farm a few miles southwest of town, while his family had been early members of St. John’s Church, proving that all roads lead back to Mokena. That March, after scouting for locations in the village, cashier Frank Liess bought a Front Street lot from elderly Franziska Stoll, that he in turn would sell to the bank for a handsome $550 before the year was over. The businessmen in charge of the concern couldn’t have asked for a better location, it being directly across the street from the Rock Island depot and smack dab in the middle of everything in Mokena. 

 

Mokena State Bank, as it appeared around 1910. Seen in the doorway are cashier Frank Liess (left) and president Christian Bechstein (right). This regal building stood on the north side of Front Street, about 75 feet west of Mokena Street. (image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

   As spring dawned, a fortuitous moment came when the bank’s building committee assembled at secretary William H. Bechstein’s grain office on Mokena Street and awarded the contract to Alfred Wenberg of Joliet to begin construction on the edifice. It would measure in at 36 by 22 feet, have solid brick walls and a regal façade of Bedford stone, containing stately columns and an august shield bearing the name Mokena State Bank. In May of 1909 ground was broken on the Front Street lot, and the first building materials began arriving over the Rock Island. The outlook was good, with the Mokena Phoenix-Advertiser boasting that “Mokena will have as fine a bank as any town of its size in the country.”  Another important contract was let in this time, namely for the bank’s steel lined vault, its burglar-proof door, an inner safe and 50 deposit boxes, all of which would be “of the best steel and workmanship.”

 

   As the walls rose on Front Street, last minute modifications were being made. A small addition was tacked onto the rear of the still-incomplete building to house its heating and lighting system in July, which proved to a month of great progress. Mokena concrete mason Julius G. Oswald and his workforce were busy plastering the walls then, while the character-rich stamped steel ceiling went in at the end of the month. In the first few days of August came the steel vault, which weighed in at 10,400 pounds, not reckoning in its door, which alone came out to 4,800 pounds. 

 

   All the finishing touches were being put on Mokena’s newest gem, and before the doors were finally thrown open to the public, all the modern conveniences such as an adding machine, a coal-fed stove for heat, and before long, a telephone were installed. Opening day came on Saturday, August 14^th, 1909, and it was a very busy day indeed, as 500 souvenir fans were given away. No small feat, as the population at the time was only a touch over 350 residents! The next big rush came for the newly unveiled Lincoln pennies, as many town folk wanted them for souvenirs. 

 

Scenic Front Street looking east towards Mokena Street, circa 1915. Mokena State Bank is visible at left. 

 

   All in all, the Mokena State Bank cost $5,000 to build, and by the end of September, $30,000 had been deposited there, roughly equal to over $900,000 in today’s money. It was an institution of financial security, and one of the stateliest buildings to ever grace our village. The old building served us faithfully for 63 years, busy as a beehive, and emerged from the Great Depression without as much as a scratch. The historic edifice was substantially remodeled and added onto in 1956, in a way that one could almost describe as brutal, as all of the grace and dignity of the original building were obliterated. In the end, the bank was unceremoniously erased from our landscape in 1972. 

 

  Join me on April 3rd, when we will explore a watershed moment in the history of not just Mokena State Bank, but also the village at large, when we’ll go back to the fall of 1924, to the day gun-toting ruffians terrorized our town. 

Up and Away: The Moving of Mokena Buildings

   Like it or not, we’re a society that doesn’t sweat throwing something away. While easily replacing many items might make life easier, it also has a bad effect on our environment and lends to shoddy craftsmanship. In stark contrast, our forefathers were of the “waste not, want not” cloth, and calling them resourceful would be an understatement. In foregone days across the country, as in Mokena, if uses for a property changed, a structure would sometimes be hoisted up and moved to a new location instead of being wastefully torn down. 

    Be it using teams of horses and log rollers, or much later, completing the process with trucks, Mokenians were avid building movers. As early the 1870s, the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church took on a project in which donations from the congregation moved the small, disused village schoolhouse and attached it to their newly-purchased parsonage on Third Street. Built in 1855 on the Public Square bounded by Third Street, Union Street, and Second Street, the school had first been vacated when a new house of learning was put up on Front Street, then came to fill St. John’s need for their own parochial school. While the move wasn’t a particularly long one, the little building having been lugged only around 300 feet, the old school got 50 extra years of use before it was detached from the parsonage at some point in the 1920s. It still stands at 11121 Third Street, one of the oldest structures in the village. 

 

    St. John’s was involved in yet another building relocation when two local brothers purchased the landmark house of worship, had it pulled a short distance, and converted into a duplex. When the then-named St. John’s German Evangelical Church opened their current, grandiose edifice in 1923, the days of usefulness for its original 1862-vintage sanctuary were over. After having acquired the church building, Milton and Roy Krapp had it moved in March 1925 from Second and Union Streets to a lot on the southwest corner of First and Division Streets, just behind their Front Street hardware store. 

 

    Not all cases of transplanting buildings were so lofty. A simple, by the books example is the example of Simon Hohenstein and Paul Rinke, saloon keeper and butcher respectively, scooting a small residence down Front Street in 1902. The two promptly converted it into an icehouse. Another typical case is that of farmer Dick McGovney, who in 1916 moved another Front Street structure, the village’s small wooden jail, to a spot south of today’s LaPorte Road, where it became his rustic home. 

 

     The transplanting of buildings didn’t always go smoothly. In the first days of 1908, local general merchandise firm Liess Brothers resolved to set down a barn behind their store building, which stood at the location of today’s 11018 Front Street. The structure originally stood south of the Rock Island tracks near the grain elevator, and as it was gingerly rounding the corner of Front and Mokena Streets, its roof got snagged on some telephone wires, and their pole snapped under the pressure like so much kindling. According to a story passed down through the generations, in roughly the same era the Bostrom family had their domicile moved down LaPorte Road, only to have the house get bogged down in a low spot. In frustration at the hiccup, the family had the house set down near that point. 

 

    Our village forebears didn’t necessarily have historic preservation in mind when they moved buildings to and fro across the village, but their ingenuity has enabled us to still count significant historic landmarks in our midst. When the old St. John’s church was moved in 1925, a long piece on its history and its proto-recycling appeared in Mokena’s News-Bulletin. Nostalgically taking the building’s 1862 construction to mind and looking brightly into the future, the paper stated that “Barring fire or storm, this building can be of service for 62 years or more.” 62 years have long come and gone since these words were first written in 1925, and the sanctuary turned house still stands solidly. Instead of wanton destruction, Mokenians of yore re-used. We would do good to learn from them.