One man knew our village as place where coal-fed locomotives puffed through town and people got from place to place in horse-drawn conveyances, while his counterpart knew a community where radios beamed in the latest news from across the globe, movies were projected on Front Street, and medical wonders such as penicillin were freely at hand. Although the Mokenas they lived in were worlds apart, these two men treated our townsfolk with healing hands. Dr. Herman W. Alexander spent the years after the calamitous Civil War in our midst, while Dr. Ernest G. McMahan called himself a Mokenian in the meaty years of the twentieth century. Both men were angels sent to us.
Herman W. Alexander made his first appearance in our world on December 1st, 1837 in St. Joseph County, Michigan, just a touch north of the border with the Hoosier State. As a 15-year-old lad, the Alexanders relocated to Cook County, Illinois, settling down in the Blue Island area, where they lived as farmers. However, higher education called to young Herman Alexander, and he went to engage in a course of studies at Hillsdale College in his old home state, before ultimately coming back to today’s Chicagoland to work as a school teacher.
In 1861, the year Alexander reached his 24th birthday, our nation was rent apart by the outbreak of the Civil War, the defining moment of the young man’s generation. A little more than a year after the start of hostilities, on August 27th, 1862, Herman Alexander mustered into the 88th regiment of Illinois volunteers as a corporal. The paperwork of his enlistment recorded him as standing almost five feet ten inches tall, and noted his dark hair and coffee-colored eyes. Corporal Alexander served on the front lines of President Lincoln’s army, and became a combat veteran after the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862, which resulted in a strategic Union victory. While he emerged from the scrap in one piece, tragedy befell Herman Alexander three days after the fight ended, when his younger brother, Hiram, a member of the same regiment, died of disease at Nashville, Tennessee.
Life and limb would be risked yet again, this time in a dramatic reversal of fortune. The Battle of Stones River, Tennessee raged from New Year’s Eve 1862 to January 2nd, 1863, and not only was this bloodbath a devasting loss for the North, but it proved to have a profound effect on the life of Corporal Alexander. On that last day of 1862, in the chaos of the Union retreat, a wagon or artillery caisson ran over the young man; the whole thing happened so quick, that he couldn’t be sure what it was that hit him. The tongue of the conveyance struck him square in the back, leaving him with a crippling injury. Alas, the rest of his military career was spent in hospitals, first as a patient, then later as a steward, when it was determined he was no longer able to shoulder a rifle. The war ended in 1865, and Herman Alexander returned to civilian life that winter.
The Battle of Stones River, Tennessee marked a turning point in the life of Herman W. Alexander.
His experiences in the war seem to have stirred an interest in medicine in the young man, and immediately after leaving the Union army he began medical school at Ohio Medical College, before furthering his education with two Chicago doctors, before ultimately graduating from Chicago Medical College. His new career brought him to Mokena in 1873, then a neat and thriving community on the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. A new, two-story schoolhouse had been built in town the year before, one which was considered a jewel in the Will County school system. The town boasted of several hundred residents, many of them German and Swiss immigrants with their first-generation American children.
Where Dr. Alexander took up residence in Mokena has proven to be hazy after so many years, but it is known that in his first days he boarded for a time with postmaster Dewitt Paddock. The doctor set up his office and a pharmacy in the Front Street property of James Ducker, where he could be found in the forenoon and evening of each day. A contemporary said that through the Mokenians, Dr. Alexander “earned a reputation of being a most careful, conscientious and successful physician.” Typical of the cases that came before him were the nasty wound that Thomas Sutton accidentally inflicted upon his arm while trimming trees in his orchard, or the mangling that J.C. Allen’s oldest son experienced when his fingers got caught in a feed cutter. (Dr. Alexander had to amputate them) The doctor also treated Rev. Carl Schaub of the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church for “brain congestion”, while later tending to Robert Bechstein, a Mokena farmer who came down with smallpox in 1881. Despite all of his, he ultimately lost his patient, and helped prepare him for burial.
Dr. Herman Alexander was married in Philadelphia shortly after New Year 1877 to Clotilde Sisson, daughter of a New York general. Despite the success of his career in Mokena and his new wife, the physician continued to be plagued by his war injury. The passage of time had only made it worse, with the trouble resting in his seventh and eighth dorsal vertebrae, which in time would be diagnosed as Pott’s Disease, a malady effecting the spine. The prognosis from Dr. Alexander’s own physicians was grim. One got straight to the point and with a gloomy tone, described him as “incurable”, and his disability as “total”, while another said that he was “gradually growing worse” and glumly writing that “he will last but a few years at best.” Dr. Alexander, while still a relatively young man, made his way around Mokena with a cane, sometimes even while leaning on a crutch. Trips to patients on the farms outside town were covered in a special carriage built to reduce jarring and jolting as much as possible. Despite the very visible evidence of his distress, Dr. Alexander kept it quiet, fearing that being ruled an invalid would hurt his livelihood. One who knew him said that he “uniformly kept his ailments and sufferings to himself.”
In the summer of 1877, a correspondent from the Joliet Weekly News made a grand tour of Mokena, and upon enumerating every business house in town, found Dr. Alexander, and concerning his pharmacy wrote that “he has a neat little store, well filled. Adjoining is a snug, cozy kind of an office where the doctor seems to take much pleasure with his books, and a half dozen diplomas upon the wall.” With the coming of the 1880s, the doctor moved to the county seat in the second year of the decade, whereupon his health degenerated significantly. Dr. Alexander’s wife Clotilde tragically passed in the spring of 1888, at a point in which he required full-time aid in his day-to-day life. In those days his household consisted of his immediate family; his adopted daughter Lizzie, sister Mrs. M.J. Baldwin, and sister-in-law Naomi Sisson.
The grave of Dr. Alexander in Joliet's Oakwood Cemetery, which bears mute testimony to his Civil War service.
Dr. Herman W. Alexander crossed the great beyond at his Joliet home on May 27th, 1889 at the age of 51 years. The ultimate cause were the many complications of the ghastly injury suffered on that winter day in Tennessee, 26 years previous. He was interred at Oakwood Cemetery, where a grand monument proudly bearing his combat record marks his last resting place. So it was, that while Dr. Alexander did not die on the battlefield, he was one of the countless men of his generation broken by the Civil War, and the ghosts thereof followed him to the end.
Be sure to check back next Saturday for part two of this piece: the story of Dr. Ernest G. McMahan.
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