A student graduates from high school, a couple gets married, and a long-time worker goes into retirement. On the road of life, milestones are reached, and when we hit them, we make them official. It’s just the same with our fair village. Mokena was born in 1852 with the momentous arrival of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, and after the steel rails were laid across the prairie, by and by commerce came to our little hamlet. She came to flourish, and after twenty years of moving forward, she was ready for the next step – becoming incorporated and having the right to call herself a village. It would be a process that took the better part of half a decade, complete with stumbling blocks thrown in the way. By the time all was said and done, the resilience and can-do spirit of our forefathers had blazed a trail to prosperity.
Fortune was favoring Mokena, a little town made up of young people born in or near the community, their parents who were born anywhere from Ohio to Kentucky to New York, a smattering of Canadians and Englanders, and the rest, a significantly high percentage of Germans. Respected for their agricultural acumen and straight-forward hard work ethic, this was a Volk who were also known to be especially thirsty. By the mid-1870s, Mokena was home to five general stores, three hotels and two blacksmith shops, but also eight lager beer saloons; more per capita than any other rural town in Will County. Proprietors such as Martin Heim, William Jacob and brothers Ferdinand and John Schiek kept the juice of the barley flowing to the farmers and railroad workers who called Mokena home, while also netting themselves a comfortable living to boot. By this time in the narrative, Sundays in town were known to be a day where things generally got pretty out of hand – decades later one resident described them as being filled with “street parades, picnics, and a wild time generally (being) celebrated on the Sabbath.”
The local situation was such that the attention of county bigwigs was drawn to the happenings in our burgh. As it was, they were the ones issuing dram shop licenses to the barkeeps in town, these being the bureaucratic red tape that allowed the saloonists to keep their doors open. At a meeting of the Will County Board of Supervisors in early 1875, it was decided that Mokena could make do with only three watering holes, and thus only so many licenses were dealt out. In these days, the Board was controlled by what one bystander called a “temperance element”, referring to the 19th century social movement that faulted the consumption of ardent spirits for all of society’s woes. Five local business owners were about to be thrown out of what was referred to as a “lucrative business.” The Joliet Republican noted that Mokenians were “Excited…to an unwonted degree” and wanted the county off their backs, and the ability to rule themselves. So it was that a petition made the rounds in town to incorporate the community as a village, allowing it to make its own rules, which was filed at the office of the County Clerk on March 14th, 1875.
Alas, not everyone in Mokena was on the same page. 70 male residents affixed their names to a rebuttal petition, to which a county judge threw up his hands – the law gave him no legal right to call the shot and come down on one side or another, and therefore the matter would have to be settled by a referendum, which was ultimately slated for April 15th at the hall of John Sutter. The balloting went off, and after an “all-day’s sharp contest”, those in favor of incorporation lost, and that with an overwhelming majority, with 25 votes being counted for, and 64 against. The media of the county seat had the final word, with the Daily Sun snidely commenting that “Mokena will consequently remain in her present benighted condition.”
Another go at trying to incorporate the town appears to have been made three years later in 1878, when a new petition made the rounds that ultimately garnered 34 favorable signatures, but how far this second endeavor went remains unclear after the ebb and flow of time. In any case, those with incorporation in their hearts weren’t done yet. The hubbub never really died down. Previously recalcitrant souls were won over, and once again pen was put to paper. Yet another referendum was carried out, this time on Friday, May 21st, 1880 at the scale house of John Cappel and Martin Krapp, Mokena’s premier hog shippers. Male citizens turned out in droves to cast their votes, and this time the tables had turned, with 50 votes coming in favor, with 22 against. The results were certified by Judge Benjamin Olin three days later, he being the same Will County judge who was presented with the first petition half a decade earlier. So it was, that our little railroad town of 522 souls was officially incorporated.
One of the first orders of business was the election of officers, which took place June 14th, 1880, just over three weeks after the first ballot-casting. Eleven names of representative citizens were ponied up, and the six with the largest amounts of votes by their townsmen were the aforementioned John Cappel, store keeper and sometime attorney Ozias McGovney, harness maker and feed salesman Valentine Scheer, railroad worker George Smith, shoemaker John Ulrich, and saloonist John Zahn. The most popular of them was John Cappel, who tallied 72 votes. The freshly elected trustees then did some voting themselves, and picked Ozias McGovney as the president of the new board, an honor which earned him the venerated place in Mokena’s history as our first mayor. 38-year-old John A. Hatch, the son-in-law of Mayor McGovney, was then appointed as our first village clerk. Nowadays eyebrows would be raised over such a close familial connection in government, but in this case, there was nothing disreputable about it, it being only a reflection of the smallness of our town.
The first mayor of Mokena, Ozias McGovney, seen here circa 1878.
Our first town government was an interesting cross-section of Mokena. Of the five new trustees, all but one of them were born in Germany, and of the entire board, all of them were fathers. Clerk Hatch and Trustee Smith were veterans, having marched with the Union army in the Civil War, with the latter having received four serious wounds in combat. The most senior of them was the mayor, who was 55 years old at the time he took his oath of office. While the others were by no means newcomers to Mokena, Ozias McGovney had them all beat, having arrived as a lad on the wild, untamed prairie where Mokena would later stand with his family in the fall of 1831. A member of the first European-American family to take up residence in today’s Frankfort Township, McGovney was no stranger to holding office. First came a post as justice of the peace upon the formation of the township in 1850, then the position of township supervisor, before ultimately giving up both in 1870, and a subsequent nomination as postmaster of Mokena in 1875.
As the newly incorporated village had no town hall to speak of, the board held their first meetings at Trustee Scheer’s harness and feed shop on Front Street, and got to work drafting the first village ordinances. Looking back upon these handwritten documents, they are a unique window to the 19th century, as they represent pressing problems in town that the founding fathers wanted to fix. They were put to vote by the board and officially adopted on August 4th, 1880. One of the freshly adopted ordinances decreed that fowl were not to run loose, it stating “it shall be unlawful for any geese, turkeys, ducks and chickens or any domestic fowl to run at large within the limits of the village of Mokena”, specifically between the first of April until the first of October. Any violators could count on a fine of not less than three dollars, and no more than twenty five. In what was likely a reference to the aforementioned wild Sundays of the time, another ordinance said:
“that it shall not be lawful for any person or persons, within the Village of Mokena, to disturb the peace of any street, lane, avenue, alley, neighborhood, family or persons by loud or unusual noises or by blowing trumpets, horns, or other instruments or by beating of drums, tambourines, kettles, pans or other serenading vessels or implements or by loud or boisterous language.”
Bearing silent witness to the ever-present threat of fires, one ordinance mandated that “no lighted candle or lamp shall be used in any stable, barn or building where hay, straw or other combustible material shall be kept unless the same shall be well secured in a lantern.” As so-called hoboes often breezed into town over the railroad and tended to cause trouble, another ordinance split hairs defining what exactly constituted a vagrant, it being written that it was a person with no visible means of support, someone who “lives idle” or “shall be found loitering or strolling about, frequenting places where liquor of any kind is sold, drank or kept” and could be found in “houses of ill fame or bad repute, ten pin alleys, billiard rooms, sheds, stables, barns, hay or straw racks.”
Though changed in appearance, the feed and harness store of Trustee Valentine Scheer, site of the first village board meetings, still stands at today’s 11028 Front Street.
Our founding fathers managed Mokena, and by and by wore in the seats of their chairs, but the story didn’t end in 1880. Flash forward twelve years, to April 1892. It was then that a letter came to town from Secretary of State I.W. Pearson, which was taken in hand by then village clerk John Liess. In part, it read “a certificate of the organization of the Village of Mokena was filed in this office, May 22, 1890, which was paid for at that time, this cert. you retain in the files of your office.” As clear as day, this note states that Springfield didn’t file our incorporation until ten years after our townfolk voted on the issue and picked a governing board. Decades later, mayor and village luminary Richard Quinn remarked “apparently, however, someone had neglected to inform the Secretary of State of the incorporation of the village until 1890.” Thus begins one of the great mysteries of our town’s narrative – what happened in those ten years? Did the initial paperwork get lost in the mail? Did a local courier get distracted on the way to the state capitol? This issue has hung fire for a good many years, with Quinn, the chairman of the committee that hosted Mokena’s official centennial observations in 1980, even suggesting to hold another celebration in 1990, which ultimately never panned out. All has been put to rest, however, by a recent communication between this author and the state’s Index Department. Upon consultation of Springfield’s records, officials on their confirmed that their documents confirm our 1880 incorporation date. Thus, another mystery has been solved and consigned to the history books.
The hard work of our founding fathers paid off, and after 143 years, Mokena is still here. Ozias McGovney and his colleagues never could’ve envisioned the long way we’ve come, and this author for one, likes to think that they would be proud of our progress. With all of our modern conveniences, comforts and prosperity that we enjoy in our village, let us not forget the way that was paved for us.
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