It was one of the stateliest buildings to ever grace Mokena. Its 19th century eminence exuded grace, money and commerce, and within its walls built by the sturdy hands of our pioneers, over a century of our village’s history played out. Having formerly stood on the northwest corner of Front and Mokena Streets, this vanished landmark, long since faded into the background of history, was host to a cross section of some of the most unique personages in our collective story. As succeeding generations grew older and new Mokenians came into the scene, the monikers for the place also changed – our forefathers in the aftermath of the Civil War knew the locale as Conrad Stoll’s general store, while early in the 20th century villagers would’ve known it as David Kolber’s hardware emporium, and later local youth called the place Gus Braun’s ice cream shop. Turning back the curtain of the ages at this corner reveals no small amount of local lore attached to this spot.
A vibrant scene of Front Street looking east towards Mokena Street, circa 1920. The edifice at the heart of this story stands at second from left, and was at this time the home of David Kolber’s hardware store.
The old structure occupied a prime location in town, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of our community’s business life. Based on its immense size and the way it was constructed, whoever it was that built this place, had to have first envisioned it as a hotel, as the Mokena of its day was a rapidly blooming, up-and-coming spot on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Who this early entrepreneur was, or if any travelers ever took a room there, is long since lost to the unforgiving tides of time. Also erased from the ages of memory is the exact date this grand edifice was built. Its walls were raised in a vernacular version of the Greek Revival style, its long, broad front being a stark hallmark of this feature. Due to the fact that this style of architecture saw widespread use in the American Midwest during the years leading up to the Civil War, it can be deduced that this building made its appearance sometime in those halcyon days after the Rock Island was first built and Mokena was born in 1852.
Looking back, the first name that can confidently be tied to this property is that of Swiss-born carpenter Sebastian Lagger, who with his wife Magdalena sold this lot and the one directly north in March of 1861. While having previously lived in our midst, at the time of the sale the Laggers had moved to the county seat, and in an interesting footnote, their son Sebastian Jr., who was born in a log cabin in Mokena in 1856, would serve as mayor of the former place from 1897 to 1900. When the Laggers sold their Mokena property, the legal paperwork turned it over to Ludwig Stoll for $450, quite a substantial sum in those days. At the time of the sale, a building was already situated on the parcel, in which Stoll operated a flour and feed store.
The new owner was a man of sterling quality, being a native of the miniscule Teutonic duchy of Nassau in the southwest of today’s Germany. Having lived in the shadow of the Taunus mountain range, Ludwig Stoll was considered an “expert miller and mechanical engineer” in his homeland. Seeking greener pastures, he left Europe with his family in tow in 1846, being fortunate enough to just miss the revolutionary upheaval that swept the continent two years later. The Stolls sailed the blue Atlantic via Holland, and landed in New York City on August 12th, after a mercifully calm voyage of 56 days. The patriarch followed his profession in the Empire State until 1855, when the twists and turns of destiny took the family to us in Illinois. Ludwig ultimately didn’t hold onto his property in young Mokena for long, as he turned around and sold it to his 42-year-old son Conrad Leopold Stoll on May 1st, 1861, mere weeks after the beginning of the Civil War. Seven months later, on December 12th, the head of the family departed from some long-forgotten ailment.
New owner Conrad Stoll would come to open a general merchandise store in the Front Street building. After first braving the transatlantic voyage reaching our shore with the rest of his family in the summer of 1846, he went to Pennsylvania to seek his fortune, only to turn up empty handed, before bouncing back to his kin in New York, and ultimately joining his father in our neck of the woods in 1859. At the time of his arrival in the village, he was on his second wife, young Franziska, and the father of seven children, of which four more would join them after their midwestern arrival. The Stolls would be inseparable with the early building up of Mokena. Aside from the new store, which would only grow in economic stature over time, Conrad along with his brothers Charles, Henry and William would build a steam-powered grist mill here in 1858. Located in the vicinity of today’s Walnut Lane, the whole concern prospered until it went up in smoke in a calamitous fire in 1860, and ultimately cost Henry Stoll $10,700. After the fire came the Civil War, the cataclysmic event of their generation, when Conrad Stoll’s 16-year-old son William fudged his age and threw his hat in with the Union Army, and was lucky enough to come back to Mokena when the guns fell silent.
In the wave of economic prosperity that swept the North after the war’s end, Conrad Stoll’s emporium became the premier store in the village, with nearly anything a resident could want being available. A prominent spread printed in an 1873 Will County directory boasted of “staple and dry goods” on hand, as well as “choice family groceries, confectionery, notions, crockery and glassware” not to mention “paints, oils, cigars and tobacco.” Often times in studying businesses conducted in rural 19th century communities, it is the male proprietor whose name stands prominently upon the record of the years. This is not so in the case of Stoll & Company, as Franziska Stoll was just as much an entrepreneur as her husband. In her time, she was Mokena ladies’ go-to connection for hats, or millinery, to use the parlance of the day. An advertisement of hers that appeared in Joliet showcased her hats and bonnets, with flowers, feathers, ornaments, (trimmed and untrimmed) being available, as well as “veils, nets, crepes, silks, velvets and laces” for sale, along with “ribbons in all shades”, as well as the very peak of class, ostrich plumes.
Conrad Stoll of Mokena was known as a genial man, as is demonstrated by his New Year 1874 gift to the Joliet Republican of a half-gallon jug of wine. The folks at the paper were thrilled by the gift, writing in their pages that
“the wine is as good as “oldest inhabitant” ever saw or tasted, and while it is appreciated for its richness of flavor, it is thrice valuable coming from a friend to a friend. May the donor live to welcome many New Years and may he ever be as happy as when we last saw him.”
Stoll was also a man who stood by his opinions, as is shown by the letters he wrote in his native tongue to the German-language Illinois Staats-Zeitung in the 1870s. An 1873 missive details his satisfaction with a recent election in Chicago, where a tough-on-crime element won a round of local polling, Stoll backing them up with the words “The rogues and loafers must get the highest punishment and Chicago must become a safe place to shop.” Another communique from four years later, in which the publication lauded him as one of the foremost German residents of the state, lamented a particularly bad season of potato bugs and advocated hefty applications of Paris Green, a highly toxic pesticide in use in those days.
Being a successful business and property owner in Mokena also came with its share of headaches, such as the time in the fall of 1894 when Conrad Stoll alerted the village board to the fact that surface water on Front Street was leaking into his cellar, which in his view was caused by insufficient drainage on the street. When exactly the well-respected doors of Stoll & Company closed for the last time has been lost from recorded history, but the concern’s founder passed in March 1897 of pneumonia at the age of 78, his mortal remains being borne to St. John’s Cemetery south of town.
As Conrad Stoll’s memory was being honored by his family and neighbors, his wife Franziska kept ownership of the Front Street property. Be that as it may, there is nevertheless a blank spot on the history of this place in these years. It is known, however, that Mokenian John A. Hatch kept his general store here for a period in the last decade of the 19th century until 1901, when he moved the business to the structure that formerly held his hall, which in that year had been moved south of the Rock Island tracks onto Mokena Street. In the first years of the new century, a succession of short-lived enterprises was housed in the old Stoll building. There were at least five saloons, one of which derisively referred to as a “grog dispensary”, while another concern, that of E.F. Niemeier of Chicago, boasted an impressive array: namely a hotel, restaurant, taproom, billiard room and bowling alley, not to mention the barber shops, a feed business, and an itinerant photographer that also took up residence there in this era.
Seen here on the right around 1910, the Stoll building witnessed a century of Mokena’s history. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)
Around Thanksgiving 1909, the Stoll estate sold the property to Frank Liess, member of a prominent local family, and cashier of the newly founded Mokena State Bank. While the Joliet press was touting the place as an old village landmark, a ghost from the past reared its uninvited head. As the paperwork of this transaction was being shuffled in the county seat, several of the now adult Stoll children challenged a tangled legal situation, in which they contended that due to intricacies in the property’s title, their mother had no lawful right to sell it, but only to will it to them. A partition suit was filed in the circuit court of Will County, but whatever its outcome may have been, is long since lost to the winds of time.
As Frank Liess took ownership, a regimen of major remodeling was carried out, with one of the most drastic changes being the removal of an old wooden porch that ran the entire southern length of the building. Liess ultimately only owned the property for less than a year, before flipping it for $2,700 to fellow village resident David Kolber in September 1910. Like Conrad and Franziska Stoll before him, Kolber was not a native born American, having immigrated to this country in 1888 as a fresh-faced 18-year-old. An interesting and often overlooked figure in our village’s narrative, David Kolber was a native of the Austro-Hungarian empire and of Jewish faith, and he and his family may have been the first followers of this religion to live in Mokena. The Kolbers located here in the spring of 1903, when David opened a hardware store and tin shop in town, which he moved into his new property on the corner in March of 1911. Even though his move was only a few doors away, the normal stress that comes with relocation was probably compounded by the fact that the pipes in the vacant Stoll building had frozen and burst two months before, with over 200 barrels of water flooding the place and streaming out of the doors and windows.
David Kolber was a man well respected by his fellow Mokenians. Years down the line, village resident Clinton Kraus would look back at the hardware man and his wife Anna, and remember their small town ways:
“These folks were sure good to all of us in many ways…He sure trusted us when money was scarce. He was one businessman who had credit, and if you promised to make payments on certain dates he believed you. If you fooled him for no reason at all, he said cash sales only in the future.”
David Kolber earned his place in Mokena’s history when he foiled a late-night break-in at the Mokena State Bank, even if he hadn’t meant to. At about 2:30am on the morning of May 12th, 1911, he rose from his slumbers and went to his kitchen to fetch a glass of water. At one point, he raised the blind on a window that faced the bank building, which was his neighbor immediately to the west. In doing so, he made a minor ruckus, which caused a man in a black coat and stiff hat who had been fiddling with a back window on the bank to flee past him and off toward the Rock Island tracks across the street. Rightfully so, Kolber found this very suspicious, and bleary eyed, made his way to the home of village marshal Conrad Schenkel to wake him and report what he had seen. The two turned Mokena upside down trying to find the man, but came up empty handed. Upon closer inspection, it was found that the window in question had been pried open a few inches. In the coming days, it was generally surmised that the would-be yegg had been casing the bank on behalf of a bigger gang of robbers. While a reward of $100 was posted for him, no one ever figured out who he was.
David Kolber might not have come to America on the Mayflower, but he was just as patriotic a citizen as the best of them. On Lincoln’s Birthday 1922, editor William Semmler of Mokena’s News-Bulletin noted that Kolber was the only businessman in town to fly the Stars and Stripes for Honest Abe’s day, a fact for which “Mr. Kolber is to be highly complimented.” Following an appendicitis operation in the autumn of 1931, David Kolber passed at the relatively young age of 61 years. Such was his position in the social strata of Mokena, that every business in town closed at the hour of his funeral.
As far as the oldest minds in the village can remember, Willard Martie and his uncle Gus Braun moved into this old place in the early 1930s, during the hardest years of the Great Depression. The two had already been in the confectionary business together one door to the east, and after planting their stakes in the Stoll building, Braun took over the concern. An unmarried man who had spent much of his life to that point as an area farmer, Gus Braun would become a Front Street fixture, his shop a place where many a Mokena youth went to get a Coke and an ice cream. Those in the know still remember Braun’s unique way of scooping the cold treat; doing so in a way that left it not as a solid ball, but rather with a hollow middle. What had likely started as a Depression era and later wartime effort to make his product go farther, would become a habit. While Gus Braun’s demeanor occasionally had a sense of ruggedness that some would describe as grouchy, his local establishment provided a place for young people to while away their time in small farm town where there weren’t nearly as many distractions available as there are to today’s generation. Aside from his confectionary, Braun also kept a pool hall in the northeastern wing of the building that was parallel to Mokena Street. This was a very manly place, not one where many women or children ventured. At least one village youngster would always try sneak a peek inside the Mokena Street entrance whenever he passed, eternally curious about what happened in this part of the structure. Gus Braun was also an avid bowler, and on league nights, would leave his shop in the hands of Art Benson, his trusty young soda jerk.
Two wooden benches in front of Gus Braun’s ice cream shop were a popular gathering spot for Mokenians. Pictured here around 1940 from left to right are Arthur Hurley, brothers Ralph and Earl Schoeneck, Hans Mueller and Gus Braun standing in the doorway. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)
After Gus Braun’s passing in 1951, there were a few confectionaries housed on the premises afterward, the first operated by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hilgendorf of Frankfort, but none of them were on the scene for long. As the years of the 1950s moved on, local businessman Milton Geuther purchased the century old building, and converted the property into apartments, providing many Mokenians with a place to call home. In the fall of 1960, the board of directors of the neighboring Mokena State Bank sealed a deal with Geuther for the historic place, and not too long thereafter, it was razed to make way for the bank’s parking lot. The time-honored walls of this spot were steeped in local history, and witnessed generations of community flavor. They saw the village grow from a young railroad stop to a post-Second World War midwestern metropolis, and even though all physical vestiges of the Stoll building are gone, those whose stories are attached to this land live on in the pantheon of Mokena’s story.
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