As Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, our forefathers used it to heat their homes and power the locomotives that breathed life to our town. We drew its glowing warmth and power from harvested coal, but as miraculous as its glimmer was, the flames were also the scourge of our ancestors’ lives. Be they embers from engine funnels, fires resulting from lightning strikes, accidental blazes due to defective flues, or even arson, fire was a constant threat. The narrative of Mokena’s long history is dotted with bad fires, including the great conflagrations of 1865 and 1892, in which huge swaths of properties were decimated, but luckily no lives were lost. Our townsmen of years past did everything they could to prevent fires before they started, and at the end of the 19th century, during the days of the oft-forgotten Spanish-American War, something came along that would revolutionize this challenge: A 100-foot tall steel water tower, which not only gave the Mokenians of yore a much-needed boost in fire protection, but also later brought the modern opulence of indoor running water. A landmark in the truest since of the word, the tower stood triumphant over the rooftops of the village, and when seen from a distance, signaled that you were back home.
Mokena's original water tower circa 1976, as seen looking east from Division Street.
Upon Mokena’s incorporation in 1880, not only was it a time of dirt roads and wooden sidewalks, but also an era of little in the way of consolidated fire protection. Water mains and fire hydrants were still but a dream. In 1883, three years after incorporation, one of our founding fathers’ first acts was to call a fire brigade to life. It would be easier said than done. On March 14th of that year, it was decreed that a meeting be called to form the fire company, and by that spring it was in existence, but the village clerk wasn’t particularly wordy about its doings or who the company was made up of.
For some long-forgotten reason, this first group disbanded, and the mayor and village trustees were back to re-organizing a new fire company in the spring of 1885. Come what was supposed to be its inaugural meeting on August 21st, and no one showed up. Things were more robust three years later, when the existence of a sixteen-man unit was logged, resplendent in new uniforms and under the leadership of Front Street hardware merchant and fire marshal John Schuberth. Not a bad outfit for a village of only a few hundred residents.
In 1889, the firemen were augmented when the village board ordered the construction of two wooden water tanks, each holding about 60 barrels’ worth. They went up on Front Street for the express purpose of fire protection, one standing in the main business area between Lewis Zumstein’s store and Ferdinand Schiek’s saloon, and the other further east in front of John Collins’ house.
Any reader to this page will be familiar with the state of Mokena in the 1890s, a period that was, to put it mildly, not exactly our village’s most prosperous time. The nationwide Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis in our country’s history prior to the Great Depression, hit the village hard, as did the completion of the Wabash Railroad to our town’s west and north which had slowly began to draw away trade over the last decade. The dearth of good roads in the neighborhood didn’t help, and more than a few Mokenians began to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Our village needed something to shake off the malaise, and just that was found in the greatest municipal project up to that time, that of the construction of our first water tower.
Thus the first steps were made in the direction of not only a real water tower, but also watermains along Front Street for the all-important reason of fire protection. It was the end of autumn 1896, and the village board was under the leadership of cattleman-turned-mayor Christian Bechstein, who began to quietly investigate and make inquiries in other towns were “water works” were already in existence, to use the parlance of the day. The matter stayed low-key for a while, until the August 1897 meeting of the board, when the chairman of the Committee on Fire and Water, lifelong Mokena resident Jacob Zahn, reported that the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works had turned in an estimate for a 75-foot tower of steel with a 2,000-gallon barrel for a total of $3,000, or roughly $100,000 in today’s money. The board moved to fish around for other bids with an important facet of any potential new tower being that it had frost casing. At the meeting in September, held at the hall of local grain merchant John A. Hatch, a representative from the Aermotor Company even came and made a presentation to Mayor Bechstein and the trustees, who politely thanked the gentleman for his time, but remained noncommittal.
On March 2nd, 1898, they showed they were serious about the endeavor by earmarking the first money for the water tower. A few weeks later, Mokenians J.W. Ducker and Sam Fulton, members of the Committee on Fire and Water, hired one George C. Morgan, “a civil engineer of the City of Chicago” for the sum of $50 to draw up “plans, specifications and contracts” for the whole project. On April 15th, the village dads studied the paperwork, and on this date motioned to “erect and maintain the waterworks” thereof, using the $4,000 they had set aside. As summer bloomed and the Spanish-American War raged, the time came for Mayor Bechstein and his board of trustees to examine the bids that had come in. After mulling over eight proposals from firms in such places as Aurora, Batavia, and West Pullman, the board chose that of the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company, who said they could build a four-column steel tower and tank for $3,180, not far off from their first estimate nearly a year earlier.
While Mokena’s treasury had more than a few dollars to its name at this point, the expense of building the water tower was more than anything it had seen up to this time. So it was that on September 7th, 1898, an ordinance was drawn up to borrow money from some deep-pocketed local citizens to build it. The next month, $1,000 in bonds were sold to Nicholas Marti, a retired, Swiss-born farmer of some means, while another $1,000 came in by way of Heinrich Schmuhl, another local elderly gentleman with vast resources.
The powers that be had the pick of the litter for building sites in town, but ultimately chose the municipally owned lot smack in the middle of the village on Front Street, that was already home to the calaboose and an outbuilding holding Mokena’s steam-powered fire engine. Meanwhile, construction had begun in earnest, and in early September, our town correspondent to the Joliet Weekly News reported that the water works were almost done. Prone to hyperbole, this logger of events, whose identity has long since been lost to time, beamed that the tower could be seen from Joliet.
Three years previous to the start of construction, village clerk and Mokena insurance man John Liess made a contribution that was vital to the project. Power would be needed to pump water out of the village well up into the new tower, and thus wind would be harnessed to do the job. A windmill was built, and while it slightly predated the completion of the waterworks and was not quite as tall, it was still nothing to sneeze at – measuring in at fifty feet tall with a twelve-foot wheel. Before it was built, Village Clerk Liess made a deal with the rest of the board, and donated a chunk of land fourteen feet by fourteen feet square on which to put it up, it being located in Lot Five in Block One of McGovney’s Addition to Mokena, or to put it in plainer words, today’s 10908 Front Street. After having giving several years of reliable service, the windmill was sold to farmer Anton Kohl for $20 in the summer of 1903. Pumping power at that point than came from a new three-horsepower gasoline engine.
As October 1898 came to a close, our Joliet Weekly News correspondent proudly wrote that the brand-new water tower was finally finished. All told, it held a total of 60,000 gallons. However, maintenance of the new waterworks came with some headaches. Come Christmastime, Mayor Bechstein and the village board were furrowing their collective brow over the fact that the level of water in the tower had somehow dropped fourteen inches in three days from “leakages somewhere.” A concerned letter was hurriedly dashed off to Chicago Bridge and Iron. The stress continued into the early months of 1899, when water was freezing in the tank. A contraption was built to keep it continuously flowing in and out of the well and into the big tank, so as to prevent its solidifying.
The water tower stood in the middle of town for the next 86 years, and not only did it provide glistening water for fighting fires, but it was also tapped into to supply the wondrous luxury of indoor, running water to eleven village homes, mostly on Front Street, for the first time in 1900. The new, state of the art water tower in use today was completed on Bonness Avenue in 1980, ironically by Chicago Bridge and Iron, the same outfit that built the original tower over eight decades before. The old one, one of Mokena’s truest landmarks, simply wasn’t needed anymore. It was decided to do away with the old mainstay, and in the autumn of 1984, a one-man wrecking crew began slicing away the waterworks from top to bottom, and piece by piece, it disappeared from the village. The twisted heap of steel symbolized the end of an era. Some might even say that it marked the end of small-town Mokena. Although it is now gone, it is remembered by more than a few as the face of the community.
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