Who doesn’t love a good mystery? From the story of the Loch Ness Monster, to the riddle of extraterrestrial life, and even the puzzle of the Zodiac Killer’s identity, they keep us spellbound, whether they happened yesterday or over a century ago. While Jack the Ripper never prowled the streets of Mokena, this writer can do you one better, for we have a mystery in our own midst. We have to turn back the hands of time 83 years, to the summer of 1939, and set the stage at the historic Front Street office of our town’s erstwhile newspaper, the News-Bulletin.
That first week of August, the paper was being assembled for its publishing date of the coming Friday. Various stories were laid out for inclusion in the issue, such as taxes to be raised in Marley, a series of nasty car crashes in Tinley Park, and the loss of Mokena’s only ball field to a property transfer. One column easily bested all the others though, and it was the one on the front page labeled Here is a Deep Mystery. The family of William and Margaret Semmler, the paper’s proprietors, even used a special bold, attention-grabbing typeface for the headline that they rarely used.
On Saturday, August 5th, 1939, Local man Harry Barenz was busy on the Semmlers’ Front Street property digging a trench for a new cellar drain. He noticed something odd when the soil turned strangely soft after he had heaved through layer after layer of dark clay. As he stood in the five-foot-deep ditch, he noticed that the soft dirt was a mysterious dark shade that matched none of the others he had seen that day. As Barenz shrugged off the change and continued his work, he struck several pieces of wood. As he worked them loose, took them in his hands and picked off caked-on soil, he could tell that they weren’t pieces of root. Heavily rotten, he realized that one of them had a handle on it. A handle exactly like the kind used on old-fashioned coffins.
This was something Harry Barenz couldn’t shrug off.
The office of the News-Bulletin on Front Street, the site of the mysterious grave unearthed by Harry Barenz in 1939. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)
As a feeling crept over him that was probably a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, he kept digging, but this time a little more gingerly. Within a few minutes, he realized he was surrounded by pieces of something else. He picked up a brittle rib, some ancient pieces of leg bone, and fragments of what seemed to be a lady’s shoe, a type of antiquated square-toed shoe that hadn’t been popular since well before the turn of the twentieth century.
It became clear that in digging the trench for the new drain, Harry Barenz had happened across a grave. After also having recovered some large, rusted spikes and a few more planks, he hurriedly alerted Editor Semmler to his find. The two flabbergasted men examined the deep furrow that hugged the northwest corner of the News-Bulletin office, and seeing that there was more wood in the ditch’s wall, reasoned that Barenz had unknowingly broken into the lower side of the long-forgotten casket. Over five feet of soil sat on the rest of the coffin, and for the time being, Mr. Semmler decided not to have the rest exhumed.
The lot on which the bones were discovered in 1939 counts as one of the most historic in all of Mokena. Today the home of an apartment building at 10842 Front Street, local lore has it that a Hessian by the name of Johann Martin Heim may have built a small, two room house on that site as early as the late 1840s, predating the first plat of Mokena by several years. One of the area’s first German settlers, Heim ran a small store out of his home, and numbered the builders of the Rock Island railroad among his costumers. In 1852 he completed an addition to his home and opened a saloon. Due to the fact that Heim was Editor Semmler’s grandfather, many tales of happenings at the tavern have survived. As the Heim place became one of Mokena’s more well-known watering holes, members of the Semmler family later recalled that the building served as a hangout for Union soldiers during the grisly Civil War, and also a premiere ball location, where fiddlers serenaded boisterous parties that “ran into the wee small hours of the morning”.
Pictured around 1870 in one of Mokena's oldest known images, is the saloon of Johann Martin Heim, who is visible in the doorway. This structure stood until the late 1970s, when it was removed to make way for an apartment building, which today stands at 10842 Front Street. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)
Martin Heim seems to have run his saloon on Front Street until he died of pneumonia in 1886. Editor Semmler’s father, a Prussian cobbler by the name of John Semmler, worked from the building sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, and from 1919 until well into the 1960s, the Semmler family made the historic building the headquarters of our community’s voice, The News-Bulletin. In 1977, the old place was torn down, and Mokena lost one of its most meaningful landmarks.
By the time the mysterious grave was unearthed in 1939, ownership of the property had been in the same family for nearly 100 years. In spite of this fact, not one of the Semmlers had a clue who the fragile remains could have belonged to. In a special issue of the News-Bulletin twelve years after the fact, Margaret Semmler theorized that they could have been those of an early Potawatomi inhabitant of our area. While this can’t be ruled out, the fact that the bones were originally housed in a wooden coffin, and the presence of the shoe from a recognizable, yet heavily outdated fashion makes this idea improbable, as they reflect European American burial practices of the time.
The earliest pioneers of what would later become Mokena didn’t always use organized cemeteries. At least two German families in this area used family plots on their farms, and it was alleged that a few children of early settler Tilford Duncan were buried in the vicinity of today’s Woodland Circle. To this day there are undoubtedly ancient graves hidden all over what is now Mokena, their exact whereabouts and the names of those within lost forever to the ages.
Maybe the bones uncovered in 1939 on Front Street belonged to a member of the Heim family? Interestingly, a check of congregation death records from the then-named German United Evangelical St. John’s Church revealed that a 12-year-old daughter of Martin Heim named Anna Maria died of rheumatism in 1875. While the remains uncovered in 1939 seemed to be female, they did not appear to belong to a child.
The cellar drain on the Semmler place on Front Street was eventually finished. Not quite sure what to do with the bones that Harry Barenz dug up, Editor Semmler displayed them in his office. Days and weeks went by. Summer turned into fall. The bones eventually faded into history and were lost. As a born reporter, Bill Semmler asked himself the who, what, and where about who was in the inadvertently discovered grave, but he never got any good leads. 83 years later, Mokena still hasn’t gotten any closer. In the words of the News-Bulletin, it has truly stayed a “deep mystery”.
However, it shouldn’t be easily forgotten that the grave wasn’t completely removed on that day in 1939. No evidence has since come to light that it was ever was, which leaves us with one question: Is it still there?
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