This is the tale of a pair of Front Street buildings, both long since lost to the ravages of time. The separate, neighboring structures were in the hands of one family for most of their existence, the Stellwagens; as such their narrative has melded into one story in the grander chronicle of Mokena. The piece of land where they once stood became for many years an idyllic and shady garden kept by Mrs. Evanis Dina, and is now a desolate, barren plot. While a passerby today would barely give a second thought to the property, decades of stories are attached to the land, some bearing joy, others heartache and woe.
To have stood in front of them, the building on the left, or west, would’ve fit perfectly in a John Wayne western. It stood two stories, tall and narrow, with a false front typical of its 19th century construction. Slabs of limestone made up its foundation, and it boasted big front windows that let in streams of natural light in the days before electricity. The easterly of the two structures was the older of the two, having been built in the earliest days of Mokena’s existence. It was fashioned in the Greek Revival school, popular in these parts in the days leading up to the Civil War. It sported a row of five windows overlooking Front Street in its second story, with three flanking its two front doors, one of which led to the living space in the house, for which the building was likely primarily built, while the other lead to a small space that once held a shoe making workshop. In its prime, it was one of the premier houses in town, a place that had been built not only for comfort, but also as something to be proud of. In later years, a bulletin board hung on its façade that was adorned with old wanted posters.
Time was not kind to these places. After decades of mistreatment, they drastically deteriorated and came to be called “the Shacks”, and alternately by Mokena’s youth, “the Haunted Houses.” This is a different kind of history, one of consternation, headache and vexation.
The westerly of the two Stellwagen buildings, as rendered by Mokena artist Jane Lorenz
While the story of these properties didn’t start with Phillip Stellwagen, they would forever be associated with his family name. The first into his fold in January 1878, two years before Mokena was incorporated, when Stellwagen bought the westerly edifice for $750, and two years later, he expanded to the east and bought the house next door in the fall of 1880 for $680. The Stellwagen name is one intimately associated with the earliest days of Frankfort Township, having hailed from Pennsylvania by way of the grand duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt in today’s Germany, and set upon the western trail in 1844. According to a legend passed down in the family, the Stellwagens broke a wagon wheel traversing the wilderness of today’s Frankfort Township while on their way to Wisconsin, and were so taken with the neighborhood that they decided to stay, establishing a homestead complete with log cabin on contemporary St. Francis Road.
Phillip Stellwagen, the focus of this part of our story, was born in November 1842 while the clan still lived in the Keystone State. (Years later, some sources would place his birth year as late as 1843 or 1844) He took Mary Bauer as his wife in 1867, and together they raised a princely family of eleven children, of whom seven survived to adulthood. After the Phillip Stellwagens took possession of the Front Street buildings, they moved into the large house on the east side of the clump and the family patriarch opened a saloon in the commercial structure on the west. At least one account of those years refers to him being an inn keeper, indicating that he rented rooms to travelers as well. While the date when Phillip first opened the doors of his watering hole remains nebulous, as does the day he closed for the last time, the Stellwagen saloon was firmly a part of 1880s life in Mokena, joining six others that quenched the thirst of our primarily German-American townfolk in those days. That Phillip Stellwagen was a well-liked man, is bolstered by two reports written in 1880 and 1883, the first stating that “Phillip Stellwagen keeps a cool and shady retreat, where his genial good humor draws many customers”, while the other said that “Stellwagen, everybody knows Stellwagen. His pool table is a favorite resort and he has a good word for everyone.”
The easterly Stellwagen house, seen here around 1910.
The Stellwagens still lived in our environs at the turn of the 20th century, by which point Phillip had given up the saloon and worked for a spell at harness making. When the 1900 census taker found him, he was recorded as still living with his family at the Front Street property and working as a teamster. In those first few years of the new century, at least part of the large Stellwagen family relocated to a farm near Blue Island; what it was that caused them to move to that neck of the woods, so far from Mokena, has been erased from the pages of history. What is clear, however, is that they retained ownership over their pair of Front Street buildings, even coming to owe money in back taxes on them.
In early 1907, two of Phillip Stellwagen’s adult sons, Edward and William, aged 24 and 35 years respectively, were inhabiting the property, while their parents and siblings continued to live in Cook County. Both single men, William (just called Dicky by Mokenians) was known for his talent at charming snakes, a contemporary saying in spring 1903 that he hypnotized the first snake of the season and “wore it as a necktie”. In the words of the Joliet News, the brothers were “a peculiar lot”, the two “seldom, if ever, allowing anyone to cross their threshold.” They were known to keep a fair number of horses on the place, and in the first week of March, one of the equines collapsed, unable to stay on its feet any longer. Some were of the opinion that the Stellwagens had been starving the beast. In the words of the same paper, “the poor horse was too poor to get its own living any longer.” Something also was amiss in the cellar of one of the buildings, with rumors making the rounds that it was full of dogs who had never seen the light of day.
Complaints had reached Mayor Ozias E. McGovney and the village board, who after mulling over the matter, turned to Levi Doty of Frankfort, a man who spent most of his life championing the rights of animals, while at the same time using the fullest letter of the law to pinion those who would harm them unnecessarily. Gathering the facts of the case, Doty set the Stellwagen brothers in his crosshairs. On Friday, March 8th, he came to Mokena and after investigating the premises, was unable to gain access to the barn on the property where the afflicted horse lay. After coming back with village constable Oscar Klose, the two finally got into the barn, where Doty could do nothing more for the animal, ultimately “putting the animal out of his misery by shooting him.” Before he was on his way back to Frankfort, Levi Doty asked Officer Klose to keep his eye on the Stellwagens, and to pay especially close attention to what they did with the carcass.
The next day the deceased horse was still there, and Officer Klose served notice on the brothers to remove the carcass for sanitary reasons. Edward and William Stellwagen responded by severely beating the law man; during the tussle, Klose’s star was torn from his shirt and his clothes nearly ripped from his body. Always prone to understatement, the Joliet News wrote that the brothers were “real ungentlemanly in manner.” In the meantime, the rumor mill had it that the Stellwagens were saving the horse carcass to feed to the dogs in their basement, and that Monday, Officer Klose came back with reinforcements (or a “small posse” in the words of the News) and arrested Edward and William, trooping them before Justice of the Peace Owen, who leveled a fine of $56 on them “for their fun.” To top things off, the village’s board of health also inspected the premises, and cited the Stellwagen brothers for having a “manure heap, uncleanly pens, coops and yard.” On March 15th, they were officially notified to abate and remove these nuisances within 30 days.
Phillip Stellwagen, the family patriarch, crossed the great beyond in the fall of 1909, and was buried in an evangelical Lutheran cemetery in Alsip, nineteen miles from Mokena. As his passing was reported by William Semmler, our village correspondent to the Joliet News, it was noted that he “suffered for some time with a complication of diseases.” By this time, all of the now grown-up Stellwagen children and their mother Mary had moved from town and were living in Thornton Township, becoming absentee owners to the Front Street buildings. The structures were starting to present a sorry appearance, and were quickly going to seed. In the summer of 1910, the village board ordered the family to fix up the property, thus began a process that would go on for decades. Part of the old saloon’s porch had caved in, as did some of the limestone foundation on one of the buildings. The Stellwagen land was overgrown with a jungle of weeds, their barn was leaning precariously to the east, and there was a deep hole near their sidewalk. Within a week, word came back from the Stellwagens that they’d fix everything. Nevertheless, they were slow in getting to it; in the August 18th, 1910 edition of the Joliet News, correspondent Semmler called the Stellwagen places “dilapidated…dangerous firetraps” and referenced yards that were a “solid mass of dry grass,” with “weeds six feet high.” A little over a month later, Edward and William Stellwagen came to town to finally work on the buildings as a result of the threat from the village board.
Whatever it was that they did, it wasn’t good enough. Six months later, the whole thing flared up again. The village board went so far as to condemn the properties, and even hired a lawyer to help draw up the required ordinance. A major sticking point became the insurance rates on the surrounding Front Street real estate, which were skyrocketing due to the Stellwagen buildings’ reputations as dangerous tinderboxes. William Semmler again referred to them as a “detriment” to Mokena. Once more, Dicky Stellwagen had been seen in town making repairs here and there, and in April 1911, local powers received a note from the family stating their intent to clean up and get rid of any dangerous edifices on their lots. It became common for the Stellwagens to make band-aid fixes on the buildings, that were just enough to get the village dads off their backs, only for the issues to come back up further down the road.
In these years leading up to the First World War, it began to look as if a new leaf was overturned for the places, as they were home to several short-lived business. Around Halloween 1908, a railroad worker named E.N. Mickel set up a watch-repair shop in one of the buildings, and also began to carry some jewelry. In the end, he wasn’t long for Mokena, as he moved to western Illinois shortly thereafter. In April 1911, the old saloon had been spruced up enough for Edward and Dicky Stellwagen to announce that they were going to open a bakery in it, and would hire a baker to oversee it for them. A portable oven and all the tools of the trade were installed in the building, and after a year’s worth of work, the Mokena Home Bakery debuted to the village on March 5th, 1912, when J.P. Caulfield of Harvey and Edward Stellwagen threw open their doors for the first time. Caulfield was called a “master of his trade”, and planned on offering a delivery wagon to customers on the farms outside town. In later years, Stellwagen sister Alma bore the Caulfield surname, and so it would appear that the baker or someone from his family married her, but at this late date it remains unclear as to when exactly this happened. Alas, the bakery also didn’t last, and by 1916 an out of towner named Charles Mantilla had opened a shoe shop here.
Readers of these pages will be familiar with the seminal fire that destroyed Martin Hall just west of the old Stellwagen saloon in the summer of 1912; and while the fire didn’t start in the watering hole turned bakery, the place nevertheless was a casualty of the blaze. The flames toasted the building, which also took heavy water damage, and many citizens of Mokena took pity on Edward Stellwagen, not least of all, because he had courageously fought the fire and had prevented it from spreading. As Stellwagen had no insurance on the building, Mayor Ona McGovney started a fund to help him get back on his feet, one that was “subscribed to liberally” by many Mokenians. As we will see, the perils of fire would come to be an uncommonly frequent thread in the history of this dual property. The next time it reared its head was on a Friday night the following summer, when tenant Joe Sandrock nearly burned down the easterly house when he fell asleep cooking on a gasoline stove. Luckily both he and the building come through the incident unharmed.
A little before Christmas 1914, word reached town that Dicky Stellwagen had died at a hospital in Englewood at the age of 42. His passing was not a pleasant one; he had stepped on a nail which then caused him to develop lockjaw. With his demise, there was one less member of the family to tend to the Mokena property. As was becoming all too familiar, calamity struck the old saloon on March 5th, 1916. That afternoon, Charles Mantilla, the proprietor of the shoe shop housed in the building, left town on a Rock Island accommodation bound for the city, and upon his return that night, he found the interior of the store in ashes. The fire was discovered at about 10 o’clock that evening by Elmer Sippel, whose mother owned a general store two doors to the west, and incidentally, Oscar Klose Jr, the son of the town constable who was so savagely beaten by the Stellwagen brothers nine years previously. Luckily the blaze had only been confined to the one building, but nevertheless, it was a bad one - all of Mr. Mantilla’s possessions were ravaged, and he even lost two parrots to the flames. (A dog and a monkey escaped) A report from the aftermath of the fire described that “only the shell of the building was left standing.” No one ever figured out what caused the conflagration, but Mantilla was adamant that that he had closed the dampers on his coal stove before he left for Chicago that day. A month afterward, he packed up and left town. The story didn’t end there. After the fire, the burnt-out hulk of the old Stellwagen saloon was left to stand, decrepit and forlorn. Nearly two months later, the village sent Edward Stellwagen a letter requesting that he put the building “in a safe condition.” Nevertheless, nothing happened, and the board of trustees lodged a complaint with the state fire marshal. Only after he became involved in the matter, did the family repair the building to a satisfactory degree that summer.
The First World War came and went, and the issue of the Stellwagen buildings never really went away. When the village board convened on August 25th, 1920, the subject of “the old Stellwagen shacks” came up. This time the prickly matter was an old, unused well in the yard that was uncovered. Once again, a note was dashed off to the surviving family members in their Cook County home asking that the matter be remedied at once, “as there is danger of someone falling in the well and being drowned.”
On an August evening in 1928, village fire marshal Herman Schweser was making his rounds down Front Street, and upon passing one of the buildings (it’s not clear which one), he observed “thin wreaths of smoke” coming from it. Upon closer inspection, he found it emanating from one of the cellars, which a group of local boys had been using as a dugout. Schweser found all sorts of flammable material there such as straw, papers, oil and gasoline, all of which the lads were using to start a small fire for themselves. Luckily the whole thing was nipped in the bud before a real problem flared up, and it was noted that the boys were “reprimanded and released.”
In reflecting on the properties and the Stellwagens decades later, Mokena sage Clinton Kraus remembered that “(it) always seemed to us that they had so much junk laying around and they never seemed to do anything about it. In plain words, it was an eyesore to the town.” It is difficult to pin down who, if anyone, was living in these buildings during the interwar years. While the possibility remains open that the Stellwagens rented the properties, if they were inhabited, no one noted it down for posterity. By all appearances, the structures sat abandoned and crumbling in these years. Some Mokenians were even known to walk on the other side of Front Street so as to avoid passing directly in front of them.
As the frigid grip of early 1939 gave way to the warmer months, things came to a head. By this point, the doors and windows of the old buildings had been boarded up, yet in the words of the village’s News-Bulletin, they still remained a “bone of contention.” In a piece that appeared in the paper on May 26th of that year, the publication referenced the efforts made by the town powers to have the places torn down on grounds of being fire hazards, but went on to detail recent unknown miscreants, who were using the cover of night to lay waste to the properties. It went on to say that “the windows, doors, plastering, wall paper, etc. was ripped out and removed from the premises. This kept on until the two houses looked as though as cyclone had hit them.”
Once again, village government rung its hands and furrowed its brow. Putting their ducks in a row, the new Mokena Civic Association put together a committee to visit the Stellwagens at their farm near Harvey and bring them up to speed on what was happening. Now in his middle age, Edward Stellwagen wrote to his older sister Emma at her Chicago home, who worked in a trip to Mokena at the end of that month. She was incensed by what she saw. Getting inside the buildings, she discovered that various pieces of old furniture had been stolen. First things first, she made a vandalism report to the Will County Sheriff, then she went on record with the News-Bulletin. She’d be staying in the buildings, she wanted it known, and not mincing her words, said that she would be carrying a revolver and that anyone who “trespasses on this property at night or any other time will stand a chance of stopping a bullet.”
The 1939 incident blew over without Emma Stellwagen having to fire a shot. In the first months after the Second World War the easterly house had been spruced up enough to be rented to Mrs. Florence Demkov, although a subsequent incident might have made her regret it. On Halloween evening 1945, some big pieces of wall board fell from where they were piled and pinned her to the ground. Her companion, Raymond Gunhouse, ran two doors to the west to the Cooper and Hostert Ford agency for help, and coming back with proprietor Barney Hostert as well as father and son Harold and Gordon Spiess, were able to free Mrs. Demkov and get an ambulance for her. Upon arrival at the hospital, it was ascertained that she had suffered a broken leg.
By the 1950s, sisters Mabel Stellwagen and Alma Caulfield had come to live in the easterly house, the same place that their father had bought for his family 70 years before. At this point in time, it looks like sister Emma Stellwagen was also living with them. They were quiet residents of Front Street, who never seemed to leave their house, and generally kept to themselves. Mokenians would occasionally see them peeking out of their front door or the house’s windows, but that was the extent to which most people saw the sisters. They were known not to welcome neighborhood kids on their property, and nearby parents warned their children to stay away. Somewhere along the way, the sisters lost running water inside their home, and their neighbors to the east, the family of barber Tony Dina, welcomed Alma to get water from their outside hose. Mabel Stellwagen died of a stroke in the summer of 1958 at the age of 67, and was joined not terribly long thereafter by Emma. So it was, that middle daughter Alma became the last family member to call the place home.
The early 1950s saw another fruitless attempt by the village board to have the old saloon building torn down, in one case citing a major fire hazard due to “reason of age, lack of repair, (and) lack of doors and windows.” Bids for the demolition were even taken in, but all were eventually shot down, the board saying they were too expensive. In August 1958, Alma Caulfield gave permission to have the old saloon building torn down, and thus a thorn was taken out of the village dads’ side that had been there for better part of half a century.
As the history books closed on the Stellwagen properties, the end of the timeline was marred by two more fires. Both of them were bad, and one them, disastrously so. Around 1:30 in the afternoon of October 4th, 1952, an old outbuilding on the north end of the lots went up in flames, which in no time measured 20 feet high, fueled undoubtedly by the dried weeds and undergrowth surrounding it. The fire eating the shed was so intense that the composition roof on the back garage of the Cooper & Hostert Ford agency, immediately to the west, started melting and running down the side of the building. The Mokena volunteer fire department turned out in quick fashion and were able to extinguish the blaze, but the speed with which it destroyed the outbuilding and effected its neighbors was alarming – the News-Bulletin proclaiming from its front page that it “threatened to wipe out the entire block.”
The next fire would leave an even more indelible mark. In the early afternoon of August 2nd, 1967, next door neighbor Dominick Dina discovered the old Stellwagen house ablaze, and ran to his workplace, the Cooper & Hostert agency, to give the alarm. Fire Chief Robert Rust, also in the employ of Cooper & Hostert, made haste to the fire station further down Front Street to the east and summoned his men, with Mokena’s volunteer department quickly turning out in full force. In the meantime, young Dina took it upon himself to rescue Alma Caulfield. Frantically knocking on her door, it was his first time setting foot on the house’s front porch, as his parents always were always serious about him and his siblings not disturbing the property. Mrs. Caulfield came to the door, and Dina explained the emergency, to which she replied something along the lines of “just let me get my purse”, to which the young man frantically explained there was no time and had to take her arms in hand and lead her away. Fire made short work of the building that had stood in Mokena for over a century. After the flames were finally put out, one of the attending fireman came out of the house with an old coffee can containing matchsticks and a dead mouse, and it was at first thought that the mouse’s chewing on the sticks could’ve begun the fire. Later on, Chief Rust would tell the press that he thought the fire started around an electrical ceiling fixture. Nevertheless, the remains of the old house were damaged beyond all help, and it was pulled down.
The historic home of Alma Caulfield, in her family for over 80 years, burns in August 1967.
After all those decades of memories, those of levity in the days when Phillip Stellwagen ran his saloon, those of agitation when the village was at loggerheads with his children, and those of caution when local parents urged their children to stay away, not a trace of the buildings are left in today’s community. Until recently, a sharp-eyed pedestrian could make out the remnants of one of the buildings’ stone cisterns, but all evidence that this branch of Stellwagen family ever existed in our town is gone, their old stomping grounds today a vacant, forlorn patch on our main street. Like it or not, their two buildings were part of the fabric of Front Street. Their history was not always glorious, but our story is not complete without them.
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