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.