It can be called the Times Square of Mokena. The intersection of Front and Mokena Streets is a place where countless town gatherings have been held; everyone’s been there, countless village residents pass through the intersection daily, and indeed, during the much-vaunted Christmas Fest parade, the crowd is thickest here. In the not-too-distant past, moveable letters would even be hung between opposite telephone poles here heralding the coming of big events in the village’s social calendar. Being such a prominent place in our community, it is naturally the site of no small amount of local history. A passerby’s attention is easily drawn to the old two-story Italianate house on the northeast side of the crossing, the old Blaeser building, indeed it’s been covered in depth on this page. Nevertheless, looking across the street to the southeast corner, we have another place that is rich in history.
Cutting through the fog of ages, it can be seen that this corner has been part of the village since its earliest days, being charted as part of founding father Allen Denny’s first addition to Mokena in the first years of the 1850s. This lot, along with the few adjoining to the east, were spoken for at an early date by James Ducker, an Englishman who in 1853 established a general store in Mokena, it proudly counting itself as one of the first business enterprises in our newly born town. He came to prosper in our midst, and even though he moved his business to Joliet in 1874, the Ducker family still retained ownership of this property until just after the turn of the twentieth century.
Emerging through the blur of the past, a young man named Herman Jacobus is the first known entrepreneur to run a business on this corner. The earliest blip on the historic radar is an advertisement bearing the date September 4th, 1875 that appeared in an issue of the Mokena Advertiser that announced his opening a meat market here. The purveyor of “a general assortment of fresh and salt meats”, another insert from Jacobus appeared nearly a year later in the August 1st, 1876 issue of the same paper that further elaborated on his business, it talking of “smoked ham, bacon and summer sausage” while also promising cash paid for hides and tallow.
An 1875 advertisement from Herman Jacobus,
Before opening his doors here, the Prussian-born Herman Jacobus married Julia Scheer, a member of a well-known local family, in November 1873 at the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church, with whom he came to raise a family. Business hummed along here for Jacobus, and he found himself cited by the incipient Mokena Board of Health in the summer of 1883 for having excessive manure adjoining the hog pen near his slaughterhouse. Time has given us precious few details about life on this corner during Herman Jacobus’ tenure, and all signs indicate that he and his family packed up and left town at some juncture.
Painting a vivid picture of 19th century existence in Mokena is fraught with hurdles due to a lack of comprehensive records and thorough journalistic coverage, and as such the hazy early half of the history of this corner has left us with a mostly empty void until April 25th, 1892, when a disastrous fire, the scourge of our forefathers, struck the site. At the time, the building on the property housed the meat market of a Mr. Kennedy, and in reporting the blaze, the Joliet Weekly News bluntly stated that the fire was a “really bad thing for the village.” Having started between 3:00 and 4:00am, the conflagration began in the one-story property on the corner, and not only was it totally destroyed, but the flames jumped to a two-story frame building to the east, gutting it as well. The News described how “the whole town was quickly aroused” and that Mokena’s hand engine and a bucket brigade valiantly fought the fires and were able to save the rest of the village.
No one ever got to the bottom of what caused the fire, as was so often the case in those days, but most town folk figured it must have been the work of an ember from the funnel of a coal-fed locomotive. The loss of both buildings was heavy, and both were considered old landmarks at the time. The now vacant corner lot became something of a headache to the village dads, who in December 1894 notified Jeannette Ducker at her Joliet home that the hole where the building stood needed to be filled in, or at least fenced off.
The turn of the 20th century is remembered as a dark time in the annals of Mokena’s past. Various economical factors, such as the calamitous Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis in our country’s history up to that point, had caused an exodus of local businesses and people, with a meager 281 residents being counted within the village gates in 1900. A rebound slowly took hold, beginning first in 1907 with the construction of Bowman Dairy’s milk bottling plant on today’s Wolf Road, along with the opening of Mokena State Bank two years later. An integral part of this bounce back was Dr. John J. Coady, who overturned a new leaf in the life of this corner in March 1911, when he had a cozy one-story building constructed on it. Measuring in at 16 by 32 feet, it contained the doctor’s office and a drug store.
Looking southwest around 1909, this view shows the corner of Front and Mokena Streets shortly before Dr. Coady built his practice and drug store here.
A 37-year-old physician late of Iowa, Dr. Coady studied medicine at the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons, and upon his graduation in 1907, settled in Mokena. He was a medicine man of the old school, and made house calls to his patients by horse and buggy, which he often rented from the livery stable of Henry Stellwagen, further up Front Street. A reminiscence written years later said that “snowstorms, rain or blazing heat did not stop Dr. Coady when the sick needed his aid.” In the days after New Years 1910, he was so busy with measles cases that he couldn’t even stop to eat.
Dr. John J. Coady married Mokena girl Mildred Brinckerhoff in April 1908, and after having endeared himself to the rest of the town, the Coadys moved to Minooka in 1912, leaving behind the little building on the corner as their legacy. Before leaving our community, Dr. Coady opened an ice cream parlor in the drug store, which in time would come to be a popular meeting place for the players of Mokena’s crack baseball team. Before the doctor left town for good, he disposed of his practice and the drug store to another physician, Dr. Frank W. Searles of New Lenox. Even though Dr. Searles sold the building itself to Mokena State Bank cashier Frank Liess and local auctioneer Charles Moriarty in the spring of 1912, he kept up the pharmacy business here. It was by all means a modern one, as the physician had the place wired for electricity within a year, and had the honor of having a 240-watt lamp on the premises, which at the time, was the most powerful light fixture in town.
In the years between the world wars, this corner was home to various enterprises. One was the upholstering business of Albert Hellmuth, who counted no small part of his trade in the finishing of auto roofs, while others were a shoe repair shop by Fred Leonhardt in the 1920s, a small grocery store run by Burt Gillette, and the barber shop of Amos Bruns. In May of 1936, while hair was being cut here, John Yunker undertook some remodeling work on the building, having the place raised up and a concrete block foundation built under it, while an addition was tacked onto the structure’s east side, which was used as an apartment by the Bruns family. While all of these concerns were relatively short lived, Mr. Bruns would later establish a well-known and long-lasting restaurant in neighboring New Lenox.
After the long and rough years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, normalcy returned in 1945, and with that, another boom to Mokena. The village experienced an uptick in population, along with some new construction on Front Street. The old adage says that history repeats itself, and it did just that on the corner, for a new drug store opened in early 1946. However, before the first customer came, a new building was constructed. And thus, the modest old building from Dr. Coady’s day, at least the second to have stood at this spot, disappeared from the landscape. A local news report from November 1945 indicated that the old structure was moved slightly on the lot and incorporated into the new building, but in the same breath, Mokena’s most time-honored citizens remember the old edifice simply being torn down.
For the blink of an eye, Allan Cavett of Tinley Park kept shop in the new brick building on the corner, until Henry B. and Lillian Boleman bought the store in May 1947. Lately of Chicago, where he owned a drug store on the south side of the city, the 48-year-old Boleman was a native of Indiana and had learned his trade at Valparaiso pharmacy school. The Bolemans were perfect matches for our village, as were their daughters, Jeanne, Marilyn and Pat. The drug store on the corner was a very much a family affair, and every member had their time working there. The Bolemans resided in living quarters within the building, which housed a typical pharmacy for its time and place, which also included a soda fountain with the booths on the west side of the building. The pharmacy also boasted of a pay phone, one of only very few in Mokena in this era. Due to the drug store’s close proximity to the Rock Island tracks, it wasn’t uncommon for Mokenians to call the Bolemans to ask if a certain train had come through, but the family quickly got so used to hearing rumbling trains, so that they barely even noticed them.
After Henry Boleman’s untimely passing in May 1957, the pharmacy was still kept up by his family, with Pat Boleman bringing prescriptions to Allan Cavett in Tinley Park and then back to Mokena, all the while learning to drive along the way. The local business was sold on contract by the Bolemans to a pharmacist named William Geisler on December 1st, 1957, however he wasn’t in business here too terribly long, as he too passed in 1959. At this point Dan Kurber came onto the scene, and paid off the rest of the contract to Lillian Boleman in February 1960. Kurber found success on the corner, before moving further west down Front Street in 1966 to a brand-new building where he (and later his son) flourished for years.
Onward the timeline marched, and the red brick building underwent another transformation, this time from drug store to restaurant. In the 1960s, Ival (known affectionately as Doc) and Ruth White opened an eatery here, who will be fondly remembered by Mokenians of a certain age. In time the building would come to house a series of watering holes, counting gents such as Marty Clegg, Mr. Speedwell and Mel Weidner as proprietors, while in years later housing bars known as The Depot and St. Anthony’s Pub.
Meanwhile, in 2002, the building on the corner received a profound facelift, in which the entire structure was gutted, a new peaked roof raised up, and the old brick walls of Boleman’s pharmacy were sandwiched in fresh clapboard siding. In a masterstroke of reuse, the old place was given a new lease on life, and continues to stand triumphant today. Time has gifted modern Mokenians with 145 years of history here, and as the tides of time pass us by, we’ll have 145 more.
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