The names of our village’s roads are a peek into our history. Some bear the names of founding fathers, such as Denny Avenue and McGovney Street, while others recall mayors, such as Everett Lane and Swanberg Lane. After all, the name of Wolf Road, originally a Potawatomi path, hearkens back to none other than Theak-A-Kee, Ty-Yan-Ac-Kee, or their word for Trail of the Wolf Through the Wonderful Land. Schoolhouse Road also makes an appearance, not only being one of our main thoroughfares, but also taking its name from a local institution of many years’ standing. However, in our fast-paced 21st century world, how many modern Mokenians actually reflect on the place from which the road gains its namesake? For over half a century, the ornate, two-story Mokena Public School stood on the northwest corner of Front Street and today’s Schoolhouse Road, a place that loomed large in the lives of generations of villagers.
The Mokena Public School on the northwest corner of Front Street and today's Schoolhouse Road, as it appeared circa 1910 in a tinted postcard.
While it was the grandest school in our history, it was far from the first, that honorable designation going to the schoolhouse that was the inaugural building constructed on our Public Square in 1855, three years after the arrival of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. A small, low-slung Greek Revival building boasting of one classroom, lightning rod and modest bell, it also served as a meeting place for Mokena’s newly formed religious congregations and whoever else needed the space. By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, the ten-year-old building was already bursting at the seams with students. It was time to upgrade, and mirroring the up-and-at-them post-war mood in our neck of the woods at the time, no expense was spared. On the edge of town at the northwest corner of Front Street and today’s Schoolhouse Road, then an unnamed farm lane, a magnificent, two-story wooden eminence began to grow. Built under the leadership of local contractor and native Englishman James B. Eason and the assistance of carpenter George Schweser, the new school bore touches of Italianate architecture, then in vogue in this part of the state, with the elaborate brackets supporting the roof and window frames, complete with its bell tower standing triumphant, which before the completion of our first water tower in 1898, was the highest point in town. All in all, the new structure measured in at forty-five by seventy-eight feet. Inside, two sets of winding stairs led down from the second floor. The meat of the structure were its two large classrooms, one upstairs and one down, each measuring in at twenty by sixty feet. Two round wooden pillars supported the ceiling in each room, although in later years more walls would be built to subdivide each room.
By the time construction was complete, the final cost of the new school plus its furnishings came out at $10,000. In those early years it was widely considered to be one of the crown jewels of Will County’s school system; only five years after its opening, eminent Will County historian George Woodruff stated that “it is a flourishing school, ably-managed and well-attended”, while years later the Mokena News-Bulletin humbly wrote that it “was the talk of the town and surrounding country in its day.” So acute was the need for the new building that it was in use before it was even finished; with the ground floor being open for students in the fall of 1872 while the second was still under construction. When the doors first opened, none other than George Kimball was one of the first pupils, who would be remembered as “the real bad boy of the school.” He was an orphan who lived with the Brumund family south of town, and he was “said to have been a great tobacco chewer and could spit the farthest of any boy.”
The pupils of Mokena Public School, circa 1880.
Through the muddle of time, it is agreed that Prof. Harris Smith was the new school’s first principal, a man whose life in Mokena’s history remains nebulous at this late date. Who the other firsts were, leaves room for debate. Whenever the subject came up in the decades thereafter, memories were fuzzy; however, it can be certain that Miss Sarah Baldwin, Miss Sarah Mather, Miss Clara Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Buck, Mr. Harrower and Mr. Rulison, were all there in the early days, although the first names of the latter educators are long since lost to the ages. In the beginning, the stately school housed grades one through eight, while around 1908 the passing of a state law proved fortuitous to local pupils. The long and short of it provided a rural student’s home school district to pay tuition for a high school of choice, thus opening the door to a high school education in a time and place when young Mokenians would not normally have had it. Some village youth took advantage and commuted by train to Blue Island in this era, a stretch further down the Rock Island. At this time, most of these pupils were girls, as local boys were needed to do farm work. A little later, Mokena’s own two-year high school was rung in in 1913, under the leadership of Prof. S.J. Eakle, an accredited chemist. Holding class in the Front Street building, a third year was added to the high school in a period of prosperity, having existed in the blink of an eye from 1925 to 1927. In this inaugural year these upper classes counted nine students, to which another teacher was added, bringing the total number of educators in the bygone school to five.
For many in the village, their day began with the 8:30 tolling of the school’s bell, which could be heard anywhere in Mokena. Peeling around eight to ten times, town folk grew accustomed to hearing it, and would even set their clocks to it. Mamie Bechstein, member of a well-known local family who served as principal at the school from 1910 to 1912, painted a vivid picture of the bell. Years later, she would describe feeling its weight when she pulled the inch-thick rope that came down from the school’s ceiling that took “quite a jerk” to set into action. As the day came to life, all pupils walked to school, some coming from as far as two miles away. On rainy days, those who marched over the muddy rural roads to get to school were allowed to take their boots off and wear house slippers inside. At nine o’clock the school day officially started, which was heralded with three or four more strokes of the bell. The fifth through eighth grades held court in the upstairs classroom, which had space for about sixty students, while the room on the main floor had space for fifty children of the lower grades. Each classroom had a platform upon which the teachers’ desk stood, with bench seats being available for the pupils, who came to the front of the room to recite their studies.
Unlike today, there was no organized lunch system at the school, with the children bringing what they could on their own. Mamie Bechstein remembered that “some brought it in buckets and some brought it in their pockets”, with some of the farm children often bringing a chicken leg and homemade bread. The spacious building on the corner was heated entirely with coal, the ashes of which would be dumped in the road. A janitor was employed whose job it was to build the fires, although throughout the day the teachers would add to it from lumps of coal in buckets. The coal was originally stored in the school’s basement, but later on a storage building was put up on the west side of the grounds, which decades later was moved and turned into a small residence just west of town on Francis Road. Running water inside the school was a luxury that could only be dreamt of. There was a shallow well on the property, water from which was blamed for any outbreak of the grippe which swept through the school in early 1911, and was also the root of rumors a year later that it was causing jaundice. So powerful was the innuendo that local hardware merchant and school board member William Niethammer had a sample of the stuff tested by two separate laboratories in Chicago, who pronounced it safe to drink. As it was, the well was also known to be finicky, not to mention the fact that older students had to help the younger ones operate the stiff pump, so many of the pupils brought their own tin cups that they filled at the John Erickson family handpump just east across today’s Schoolhouse Road.
Seen here around 1920, the village schoolhouse was a landmark for generations.
On a normal day, an early recess would be had from 10:30 to 10:45, with more ringing from the regal bell. Girls had ample space to play crack the whip, while boys would play baseball, which led to the occasional problem of a ball flying across the Rock Island tracks, and being unretrievable due to traffic on the railroad. Around the turn of the 20th century, boys would also play shinny, an informal kind of hockey. Nevertheless, casualties mounted, and the powers at the school came to find the game “too rough and dangerous,” which ultimately led the school board to ban it in November 1910. Bill Semmler, our correspondent to the Joliet Weekly News, carried the word in his Mokena column, to which the editor chipped in:
“Ah, what a wealth of memories the game of shinny brings forth! Who has not landed in the game in time to get the battered tin can in the face, or the hickory club in the shins… Better call it golf and let the lads have all they want of it, so long as the teacher keeps out of harm’s way.”
And after a day’s learning, the pupils would gather their books and head home at 4:00, with two or three more strokes of the bell. Aside from the drudgery of their studies, the school could be a lighthearted place. Pupils were known to slide down the black walnut railing of the building’s staircase, and music was supplied by a Julius Bauer piano installed in the upstairs room in the spring of 1911, paid for by two plays staged by the students. Not to be outdone, eleven years later in the spring of 1922, two Victrola phonographs were purchased for the school, an improvement which the News-Bulletin hailed as “never dreamed of.” At the same time, new playground equipment was put up, consisting of teeter-totters, slides and the like, the cost of which was footed by dozens of Mokenians who helped raise the money. In describing these new niceties, the News-Bulletin proudly stated that “more improvements have been made this fall than have been made in the last 20 years.”
Nevertheless, as nice as the new playground was, it could also be a risky place. In the spring of 1927, an unimaginable accident befell ten-year-old Iris Hamilton, when in using the slide, a long, jagged sliver of wood drove itself into her leg. The school’s principal, Prof. Clarence Uhl, was quickly on the scene, and hastily determining that two arteries had been cut, stanched the flow of blood by pressing his thumbs against them. Iris was transported to Front Street’s Cooper & Hoster Ford agency with the sliver still in her leg until professional medical help arrived 45 minutes later. The News-Bulletin monitored the happenings closely, and stated that “the quick action and thought of Prof. Uhl was the only factor that prevented the child from bleeding to death, and his many friends here say he is worthy of a Carnegie medal for saving a life.”
The pupils at the Mokena school were generally happy, however, an incident from 1913 stands as a stark contrast on the record of the years. In February of that year, the halls of learning “came nigh being the scene of a strike” when some of the students threatened to walk out and not come back until their complaints were taken seriously. The scholars told their parents of “petty annoyances” and bristled at what they felt was discipline that was too strict. In many cases, the parents backed up their children. Luckily for all, “cooler heads prevailed (and) the trouble was smoothed out.” Mokenian Bill Semmler, our village’s correspondent to the Joliet Weekly News, was of the opinion that overindulgent parents were to blame, writing that “over fond parents are often a hindrance to the welfare of a child and such parents cannot see the faults of a child as well as a teacher can” and that “when tales of petty annoyances are told at home, parents should investigate ere giving the child their opinion.”
A similar incident occurred at the end of the 1917 school year, when some of the high schoolers, in their class publication The Blab, raked the board of education’s members over the coals. Bones of contention were the aforementioned pump and the lack of running water in the school, the fact that the entire building had yet to be electrified (with the honor only belonging to the upper room at that point) and the absence of screens in the school’s windows. A defender of the board rallied to their aid, and in the latter point, retorted that “an epidemic hasn’t yet made apparent of screening the rooms to protect the children against the flies that swarm there during the fall months.” Going on, this individual said that The Blab’s comments were “entirely uncalled for and (the) paper should be discontinued for its sarcastic remarks.”
So it was that pupils occasionally had grievances against the school’s leadership. On the other side of the coin, for a good span of the building’s life, punishment was dealt out with a rod and switch. In Florence Pitman’s seminal 1963 work The Story of Mokena, she recalled that
“in the nineties it was the universal policy of parents to start their children to school with the admonishment, “If you get a whipping at school, you will get another when you get home.””
Nevertheless, there was a limit. As far back as the spring of 1874, when the school on the corner was a brand-new structure, Prof. Harris Smith, the school’s first principal, landed himself in trouble for dealing out chastisement that was a touch too heavy handed. He struck a small boy with a hickory whip stock for refusing to get a scuttle of coal, to which the Joliet Republican snidely remarked “that strictness cost him the little sum of twenty five dollars” or the equivalent of about $665 in today’s money. As it were, Smith was not a popular man in Mokena, the same paper’s town correspondent a few weeks letter penning that “Mokena has one of the finest school buildings in the county. It is wished that we had half as fine a principal to run it” while going on that “the man who tries to run it now says, “if you don’t like my style, keep your children at home.” Our local writer estimated that two-thirds of Mokena’s parents were doing just that.
In addition to being a house of learning, the school also served as a community showcase, with countless entertainments being given there over the decades. Typical was the exhibition given on Saturday evening, February 24th, 1883. The weather that night was less than ideal, but Mokenians braved the muddy roads and turned out in full force. Music was supplied by the Mokena Cornet Band, backed up Mrs. N. Enders and Miss Lizzie Brumund on the organ. An opening song was given by the school, followed by various recitations, readings and dramatic pieces, such as “Johnnie Schrimp’s Idea of Amusements”, “Watermelon Pickles” and a pantomime called “A Temperance Story”, all of which were put on by the students and teachers. When a final tableau titled “Comfort” was due to be framed, school directors John A. Hatch, George Schweser and Robert H. Turner were called to the stage, where they thought they were being asked to speechify. Much to their surprise, it turned out they would be taking part in the tableau. An elegant chair was placed for each of them on the stage, each one a gift from the teacher and students, “thanking them for their kindness and interest manifested in making things comfortable for them.” One who was there said that the three men “were so overcome they could not find words to express their gratitude.” When all was said and done, the proceeds netted from the night’s festivities were $25.75, or around $835 in modern funds.
Alas, the good old days weren’t always good, as is demonstrated by a peculiar incident that occurred in the fall of 1908. On Wednesday morning, October 14th, twelve-year-old Viola Hansen opened the schoolhouse doors and went upstairs by herself. Upon doing so, she happened upon a strange, unknown man lying on a bench in a side room next to the library. She thought he appeared to be asleep, but couldn’t be sure. Viola was thoroughly shaken up by her discovery, and sprinted back to her Front Street home, and when others came to investigate, the stranger was gone. It was gathered that he gained entrance to the building through a downstairs window.
The school was also subject to extreme temperatures during the more inhospitable months. For most of the building’s history, it had no central heat to speak of, with warmth being provided by two coal burning stoves in each room. Local sage Clinton Kraus would recall that he and his fellow students in pre-World War I days would gather around the stoves and study, with the best-case scenario being that the pupils near them would be in torrid heat, while those farther away would freeze. Such was life until 1911, when the school board had a state-of-the-art heating system installed, being the first school in Will County to be so equipped. On the other hand, air conditioning was still decades away, and is something the school would never boast of.
At the beginning of the school year in 1893, an unlucky combustion of coal stored in the basement ignited a fire that “caused quite a little excitement for a time.” Luckily, things were quickly brought back under control and the flames made no serious headway, but nevertheless, the starkness of the situation was lost on no one. Talking to the Joliet Republican, Mokena village leader Ozias McGovney grimly said that if the fire had gone unchecked, the whole building would’ve been lost.
Flames again reared their uninvited head on a school day in the winter of 1922, when on February 6th the ashes in an overheated stove set the floor of the upstairs room ablaze. Pupils were marched into the cold outdoors, (some of whom, purportedly, were unaware a fire was happening) and the flooring torn up, once again preventing a small fire from becoming a serious one. Indeed, concern over fires was a deep one for the school board. After the infamous inferno at Collingwood, Ohio in March 1908, it was resolved that a fire escape would be built on the exterior of the aging structure, and by the following August, a Joliet concern had finished the steel stairs. The school’s main doors facing Front Street were also fixed, now they opened outward instead of inward, which to that point had been the case. When the first official fire drill was carried out toward the end of 1910, the pupils expertly used the escape, even though a few of them felt some initial trepidation.
As the decades came and went and life went on in Mokena, the school was beginning to show its age. By July 1922, the house of learning had sagged to such a degree that an architect from the county seat was called out, who was greatly alarmed at the way the stone foundation on the east side of the building had bulged outward. To remedy this, it was recommended that 21 concrete piers, each three feet square, be built underneath the school. Alas, it was only a temporary fix. As the decade progressed, talk in town heated up about constructing a new school, and after 57 years of serving Mokena’s youth, the grand old landmark was ready to be taken out to pasture. The last classes were held here in June 1929, the same year the new school on Carpenter Street opened, which now serves the community as our city hall. Pupils were happy to make the move, with one being exuberant about “getting to the new school house away from the noise of the railroad, where (we) will have more room to play.”
So it was that America plunged into the Great Depression, and the grand old school sat vacant for the next four years, during which time conjecture swirled about its future. At Christmastime 1933, Will County superintendent of schools and Mokena native August Maue advised our school board to let it stand, citing his experience that “in every district in which the old schoolhouse was sold or torn down has been that very soon thereafter the building was needed for regular school purposes.” In the spring of 1934, the question was posed to Mokenians during the annual school election as to whether the building should be sold or not. The village’s News-Bulletin was firmly in the former camp, writing that the place was “abandoned and facing ruin” and that the community would be better off with the school board profiting from the sale of the property. The election came, and Mokena’s voters gave the green light for the building to be sold at auction on Tuesday, May 15th. Before the sale, the school’s old iron bell, installed in 1881 and the work of Philadelphia’s McShane Foundry, was removed from its tower and stored at Front Street’s village hall. There it was held onto for safe keeping, with the News-Bulletin deeming that “it may come in handy for future use.”
As the sales calls were cried and bids cast into the air on that spring day, Lester Schiek came out as the winner, beating out everyone else by offering $325 for the old school. Schiek will be known to readers as Mokena’s genial dairyman, who was also a member of the school’s first high school graduating class in 1914. Incidentally, one of the school’s outhouses was sold to J.M Yunker for $5, and the other to Ed Marshall for $7.50. Teaming up with his brother-in-law Byron Nelson, Lester Schiek set about to disassemble the landmark at the end of May 1934. The two men were of an admirable generation that didn’t waste, and set forth to use the school’s robust lumber, of which it was reckoned there was at least three boxcars’ worth and just “as good today as the day it was first used” to build some new houses in town. This author is aware of at least six houses in Mokena, including his own on Midland Avenue, that claim to come from school lumber. Alas, with the unmerciful passage of time, it is impossible to verify which claims are authentic. The deconstruction of the school turned out to be a veritable trip down memory lane. When the blackboards were taken out in the spring of 1929, the back of one of them was found to be covered with writing bearing the date September 21st, 1902. On it were enumerated the names of the board of education, to wit Christian Bechstein, Simon Hohenstein, and Erwin McGovney, as well as teachers W.J. Cunningham and Leah Smith, not to mention carpenters J. Bigger and Charles Maue, indicating that the moment preserved in time must have taken place during a renovation project. As the walls came down bit by bit, a book on grape growing published in 1850 was discovered between them, as was also a hammer with a broken handle, lost by some ancient workman. Incidentally, the process of taking apart the old building was helped along by what was deemed a “baby twister”, which struck town in early July. “Shingles, laths, and pieces of lumber” were described as flying through the air, all of which sent Byron Nelson running south of the Rock Island tracks to the Conoco oil station for shelter.
The work was completed in the last week of July 1934, with our News-Bulletin heralding on its front page that the “old Mokena school (is) a thing of the past.” While those venerated halls of education have long since disappeared from our landscape, their legacy lives on in some very tangible, everyday ways, such as the road named after the school and the houses built from it, all of whom are just as sturdy now as the day the school first went up in 1872. Not to be forgotten however, is the fact that the school’s erstwhile bell, a very important part of life in the Mokena of our forefathers, still remains here in town and can be readily visited. As the years went on, the old bell made its way to the fire department, who trooped it out occasionally on parades. In 1979, the bell was rediscovered in our midst, and as the 1980s carried on, interest in the historic relic bloomed. School Superintendent Ray Garritano came up with a plan to build a new bell tower in town much in the style of the old school’s, and after a period of brainstorming, the bell and its new home were officially dedicated on September 12th, 1985 to the students past, present and future of Mokena Public School. Thus the bell, whose strain had echoed over the rooftops of the village for decades, was given a new place of honor on a sunny knoll between the library and schools. A neat ceremony was held, complete with the pledge of allegiance led by Craig Yunker, the recitation of the Eleanor Farejon poem “School-Bell” by Amy Danielewicz, and a releasing of balloons by third grade students.
The 1881 bell of the Mokena Public School in its current home.
The bell still reposes there to this day, a small piece of one of the grandest schools Will County ever knew. It is the legacy of hundreds of Mokena children who attended class in our town in the buoyant days after the end of the Civil War, spanning the years until just before the start of the Great Depression. Their ways of life are today but a distant memory, almost lost in the haze of time. May this august iron bell serve as a permanent reminder of their stories.
