Every story has its beginning. Be it the first chapter of a well-loved book, the first episode of a long series, or even looking back to the founding fathers of our nation, everything has its root. On the illustrious record of our nation’s years, the names of Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson appear, just a few of the number of great minds who are all rightly entitled to their places in our country’s hall of fame. Looking back to those optimistic days before the Civil War, there are many in our own community who can be called our framers, although there is one who stands out in earnest, well above the rest. While time has passed him by, and Mokenians of the 21st century don’t often think of him, Allen Denny was made of the same stuff as a Franklin or a Jefferson, a man of truly sterling qualities. To study the life of this man, the founder of our village, is to see a reflection of the early history of our nation.
Allen Denny made his grand appearance in our world the day after Christmas 1790, a little over a year and a half into the first term of George Washington’s presidency. His first breaths were drawn in Albany County, New York. The son of Charles Denny and Lucinda Allen, the boy had an impressive pedigree; his father being a veteran of the American Revolution, and his mother, for whom he was named, was said to be a cousin of Ethan Allen, the famed revolutionary patriot and founder of Vermont. Allen Denny would stand at the head of a list of ten siblings, the first of which, Alvina, made her appearance when Allen was not quite two years old, while the youngest, Coridore Philander, was 28 years his junior, young enough to be his own child. Throughout his childhood, the Denny family called various locales in the Empire State home, until 1811, when as a 21-year-old young man, Allen made his home in a place that would later be called Sheridan in the freshly formed Chautauqua County, the westernmost county in New York on the southern banks of Lake Erie. Here he soon got to work opening a small country store that sold a little of everything.
In what would become the defining event of his generation, the War of 1812 erupted in the summer of that ill-fated year. A stirring yet unfortunately mostly forgotten chapter of American history, the conflict was rooted in grievances with Great Britain that were left unresolved after the Revolution and friction with native tribes on the frontier. The fray also has the grim designation as being the only time our capital city was occupied and sacked by an enemy force. Young Allen Denny put his life on the line when just shy of his 22nd birthday, he volunteered for duty in the Chautauqua County militia, serving at least two terms as a non-commissioned officer in the companies of Captain Jehiel Moore and Captain Morton Tubbs, where he ultimately bore arms against the British until 1814. At least one of the stints was as a substitute for his father Charles, who was home on a furlough sick. Our humble New Yorker would’ve served yet a third time in the course of the war, if his younger brother Lysander wouldn’t have went in his stead in 1814. Upon his entering the service, Allen Denny was described as being around five feet four or five inches tall, with light hair and blue eyes, cutting a picture of a typical American man in his time. Denny’s military service was no trifling matter, as he fought at the Battle of Black Rock on December 30th, 1813. Taking place near Buffalo on the Niagara River, this fight was a particularly brutal engagement, even as far as warfare goes, and a terrible defeat for the New Yorkers who were there. Allen Denny was part of the retreat, (which an early Will County historian would deem a “stampede”) and witnessed firsthand the subsequent burning of Buffalo by British forces, and would recall both for the rest of his days, never sparing a detail.
Erected by the Mokena Women’s Club in historic Pioneer Cemetery Cemetery in 1997, this monument details the life of Allen Denny. While commonly mistaken for a grave marker, Denny’s remains are buried in New York State. (Image courtesy of Mike Lyons)
As the guns fell silent and the war ended in early 1815, life slowly returned to normal for the young Denny. Somewhere in this timeframe, as was a common source of entertainment and further education in his time, the merchant went to a public speech. The speaker was a gent from the New York State Temperance Society, a representative lecturing on the moral righteousness of the total avoidance of alcoholic beverages. Many were the adherents of the temperance movement in the America of yore, who blamed ardent spirits for every societal woe in the country, and those who believed in it placed its merits next to Godliness. Allen Denny heard the man’s talk and liked the cut of his gib, and thus was won over to the movement and became a lifelong devotee to teetotalism. So strong were his thoughts on the matter, that he immediately stopped carrying whiskey in his store, and with five others in tow, formed his own temperance society.
While Allen Denny took Connecticut lass Lucy Herrick as his wife at some long-forgotten date, history has not been kind, and has left us with no details as to her life, background, passions, or overall identity. Details on the children that graced their union have also become clouded with the passage of time. What can be pieced together, is that they had at least three; Herrick, a boy who died young, Alonzo, another son who was born around 1822 and survived well into the twentieth century, who in his middle age was a businessman in Mokena before eventually heading back to the east coast, and a daughter named Eunice, who may have been their oldest. She seems to have born around 1818 or thereabouts, and always stayed close to home, be it in New York or Illinois. Confusingly, Eunice was not enumerated with her father in the 1850 Census of Frankfort Township, where instead a 28-year-old daughter named Emma is listed. This begs the question, did the census taker simply mishear Eunice’s name and adjust her age? Or maybe she was just living elsewhere at the time, and Emma is a “lost” family member? In any case, this is the only instance in recorded history where an Emma Denny is shown as the daughter of Allen. After spending many years in Mokena, Eunice went back to Chautauqua County to live with her brother Alonzo, and disappeared into the mists of time in the 1880s.
With the War of 1812 in the distant past, another great turning point in the life of Allen Denny came in 1834, at which point as a 44-year-old he moved home and hearth to what would become Mokena, in the heart of the untamed West. His reasons for moving have disappeared into the past like a mirage in the fog, but it is known that his trek was made in tandem with the Asher Holmes family, who would come to figure prominently in the history of New Lenox Township. At this time, the Black Hawk War, which had had so stirred our neighborhood, was freshly over, with hostilities having ceased two years previously. In the days in which the Dennys arrived in these environs, it is vital to understand that there was no Mokena, no Frankfort Township, not even a Will County, as we were still part of southern Cook County in that era. No railroads existed to quickly transport people and goods. Chicago and Joliet were mere hamlets in 1834. If any Mokenians of the 21st century would be transported back in time to those days, we’d be totally out of place in an unrecognizable, alien world. The thoroughfare we now know as Wolf Road existed, but was known as Theak-a-Kee Ty-Yan-Ac-Kee (or “The Trail of the Wolf through the Wonderful Land”) in the local Potawatomi tongue, who in their abundance had to traverse the path single file due to its narrowness. Allen Denny and his exceedingly few neighbors broke the prairie soil without the aid of a steel plow, which had only just been invented the year before by John Lane of the Yankee Settlement, in the neighborhood of today’s Homer Glen. All water came from the rushing streams of Hickory Creek, timber for the rough-hewn logs for the pioneer’s cabin homestead was supplied by the lush forests on its banks, and wild game was plentiful. With Denny’s 1834 arrival, something as simple as a trip to the post office required a journey to Billy Gougar’s, six miles to the east, until another post office was established at Chelsea, near today’s Frankfort in 1837. All of the lands encompassing the future site of Mokena were owned by the federal government, and upon choosing a claim, an early settler would later have the right to buy it when it would come up on the market.
When Allen Denny first set foot on our terra firma, he could only count the tiniest number of near neighbors in his midst. The Atkinses of Vermont got here the same year, while Tilford Duncan and the family of Francis and Keziah Owen arrived from Kentucky around the same time. The John and Nancy McGovneys, probably the Dennys’ closest neighbors, got here first in the fall of 1831, and as they were residents of three years standing, were the longest ones for the neighborhood, however they had fled to the safety of Indiana during the Black Hawk War. Matthew Van Horne, who was affectionately called a “Mohawk Dutchman”, lived a trifle closer to where Frankfort is now, along with Foster Kane, who purportedly stayed in the Hickory Creek timber during the war, but within a generation, eyebrows would be raised at this claim.
The Dennys were by no means alone in our neck of the woods, as some of their kin soon came to join them here. Lysander Denny, a brother to Allen eight years his junior, relocated here in the same decade. A millwright by trade, he built one on Hickory Creek, which at that time flowed with enough gusto to power the mill’s saw. Brother Alanson Denny was also an early citizen and came into possession of a tract of land near the future site of Mokena, however the details of his life have been scattered by the winds. Sister and brother-in-law Hepsibah and Samuel Haven made their way as well, Samuel having been a charter member of Allen’s temperance society back in New York. The Havens are a family whose name is writ large in the history of our neighbors in New Lenox, and were the owners of a house later known as the “Old Brick Tavern”, which graced the Lincoln Highway for a century and a half, until an unscrupulous developer destroyed it in the 1990s, in what amounted to a colossal waste of a priceless historic landmark.
The members of this hardy pioneer clan were also joined by their patriarch and matriarch Charles and Lucinda Denny in 1838, who in the sunset of their lives, wanted to be closer to their children. Both passed in the summer of the following year, when Allen broke ground to inter them on a peaceful rise on his corner of the prairie. As time went on, other relations came to follow them in what became our first cemetery.
A mere six years after his arrival in what came informally to be called the Hickory Creek Settlement, Allen Denny found himself intimately involved with one of the most electrifying occurrences in the early history of eastern Will County. Early on a summer morning in 1840, he happened across the corpse of a man in a millpond near where New Lenox now stands, it being clothed only in a brown cotton shirt and displaying signs of a “high state of putrification.” Freshly cut lengths of rope and clumps of hair were found, along with suspicious wheelbarrow tracks. Denny alerted his neighbors, and before long the whole affair blew up into what would be remembered for decades as the Van Horne murder case, in which an early resident attempted to frame a member of the aforementioned family for the deed. Allen Denny’s testimony was key at the forthcoming inquest, which contain some of the earliest written records painting a picture of his life in our region.
Denny’s decision to stay in Will County was cemented when he began formally purchasing the land upon which he was living and farming. On May 20th, 1841, he purchased two eighty-acre tracts of land, for which the paperwork was deposited in the general land office at Chicago. By and by the documents were forwarded to the then-called Washington City where they were signed by President John Tyler. The lands encompassed in his purchase were pure, unbroken prairie; one of the wide expanses began at what is today the northeast corner of Wolf and LaPorte Roads and stretched a ways to the north, while the other, situated a tad further to the north, centered on what we now know as the northwest corner of Wolf Road and 187th Street, continuing past the route of modern day Interstate 80. These acquisitions were a harbinger of the future, for it was upon this first tract that our village would later be borne by Allen Denny’s hands.
As the days passed and the 1840s continued, tragedy struck the Denny household when Lucy Denny passed away in the frigid January of 1844. As it was exceedingly hard to live as a single man in the unforgiving pioneer’s life our forefathers knew, Allen Denny took local widow Polly Marshall as his second wife in August of that year. Herself a fellow New Yorker, Denny did well to marry her, as Polly’s former in-laws were prominent residents and also early settlers to our area, living on the border of the future Frankfort and New Lenox Townships.
With Allen Denny comfortable as an established resident of the Hickory Creek Settlement, America was being rent apart by the issue of slavery. He became active in the newly formed Liberty Party, a short-lived political group dedicated to eradicating the institution, and was high-profile enough to be nominated on this ticket as their candidate for Will County Sheriff in 1844. (Alas, he didn’t win the election) Denny was also a long-time subscriber and ardent supporter of the Western Citizen, a paper published in Chicago that was the premier abolitionist publication in what we now call the American Midwest. He also spent time and great effort raising money for the cause, such as at the end of the year 1851 when he was collecting pledges in our area for the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. Many are those who foster beliefs, will stand behind them and speak up for them till the cows come home, but Allen Denny put his money where his mouth was, and became a man of action. He would be remembered as a man who was “zealous” in his mindset. Pioneering Will County historian George H. Woodruff quoted the sentiments of Denny and those like him, in that “to help a man who was fleeing from bondage was a duty – that to aid in his capture was a crime against God and man.”
In time, Denny would come to operate the only documented station in today’s Frankfort Township of the famed Underground Railroad, likely working in tandem with his brother-in-law, Samuel Haven, who ran a station on his own homestead two miles distant. Whether Denny shuffled three escaped slaves on their way to Canada or three hundred, he got caught. While Illinois was indeed a free state, the Fugitive Slave Act was on the books in the north, which forbade giving assistance to refugee slaves. Once again, the exact details of these legal proceedings, and what exactly his punishment was, have disappeared into the pages of posterity.
As an aside, many are the tall tales of Underground Railroad activity that have spread through Will County in the century and half since its existence. However, that of Denny and Haven’s is an authentic one, as verified by none other than historian Woodruff himself. Looking back from a safe distance thirteen years after the end of the Civil War, the Joliet pharmacist turned scribe wrote that he “knows of some who paid midnight visits to both stations. A midnight ride with one or two fugitives was an exciting thing in those days, not without danger of being prosecuted at least.” Going back even earlier than Woodruff’s account, is a piece that appeared in the Fredonia Censor in 1871, a paper from Allen Denny’s old stomping grounds in Chautauqua County, New York. Its writer interviewed Denny while he was visiting his son Alonzo, and stated that in his Illinois home he had “kept an acknowledged underground railroad station for the accommodation of sojourners in quest of inalienable rights.”
These hair-raising tales of the days before and during the Civil War beg the question, where in Mokena was Allen Denny’s station kept, this erstwhile beacon of freedom? A legal document from the later years of Denny’s life describes a 19-acre piece of land that was specifically named as his homestead, a place through the middle of which Scott Street would be built in the 1950s. As late as 1911, when queried, Mokenians of a certain age readily identified the spot as being very near where the Schacht family then lived; they being long-standing residents of the vicinity of today’s Grace Fellowship Church. In any case, after the passage of more than 160 years, it remains impossible to say with certainty.
As the intricacies and perplexities of Mokena’s history have long since swallowed up so many of the details of life in Allen Denny’s day, we also do not have a crystal-clear vision of what his house looked like. It can be surmised that his first homestead in our midst was of the rustic, yet determined type of domicile that matched the personalities of our forefathers, it likely being built out of hand-fallen Hickory Creek timber and lacking many conveniences. As time went on and success smiled on the Denny family, they probably upgraded into a somewhat more comfortable residence, as was often the pattern among our forebears. Maybe he incorporated the old structure into the new, repurposed it into an outbuilding or even reused the original building material into a new project.
In the 1850s, Allen Denny began the process of filing a claim for a pension from the federal government for his service in the War of 1812, as did so many of his former brothers in arms. A long process filled with hoops to be jumped through in proving one’s claim, it wasn’t without vexation for our old veteran. First, the muster rolls of the company in which he served went missing, then bureaucrats in Washington City had no written record of his discharge from the militia, and as Denny couldn’t remember the numeric designation of his regiments, he had to write back to an old war buddy in New York to help jog his memory. The man turned out to be of not much help, as his recollections was also foggy, but being a part of the same process, empathized with his former comrade by closing his letter with a cheer, noting “success to us and all who put shoulder to the wheel.” In trying to piece back together the events of four decades previous, Allen Denny looked back at the war and wrote that “it seems more like a dream than reality.” All in all, he got his pension, and by the time he was 81, was getting eight dollars a month from Uncle Sam, or around $200 in today’s money. Like many 1812 veterans, in addition to his monthly stipend, Denny also received at least one 80-acre parcel of undeveloped land in Iowa around the time Mokena bloomed for services rendered, but as the pioneer felt rooted to his home among us in eastern Will County, within a short time he sold the property to a third party.
So it was in this era that the great iron horse was expanding across America and opening doors that had previously never been imaginable. New railroads were sprouting up across the land, ferrying goods and passengers to points far and wide, something that in our neighborhood had only been possible with ox-drawn conveyances on days-long treks through the roughest of conditions. One of these wondrous new roads was the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. After much doing, the company was officially organized in 1851. As their right of way was being surveyed across the prairie from Chicago to Joliet, a long stretch was due to be built through the northern half of the newly formed Frankfort Township, and more specifically, straight through Allen Denny’s pasture. He and his wife Polly sold the Rock Island the strip of land needed for the right of way, with a clause in the legal paperwork stating that if the company were to go defunct within five years, the property would revert back to their ownership.
The company staked out a spot in a central point in his acreage where a depot would be built, with only one other in the works between Chicago and Joliet at Blue Island. Allen Denny could see which way the wind was blowing, saw that new people would be coming hither and thither, that tradesmen would want to be near a new railroad, and sensed money was to be made. Therefore, in a moment filled with meaning, he subdivided a plot of land around which the depot was to be built. Thus in the planting of this first seed, a great shift occurred in history and our village was born. Denny’s plat contained two principal streets running from west to east parallel to the railroad tracks, known today as Front and First Streets stretching from modern Wolf Road to Division Street, sandwiching therein 38 lots of various sizes. Jeddiah Woolley, chief surveyor of Will County, did the legwork and the plat was filed on May 26th, 1853. The new subdivision was named Mokena; but by whom, be it Allen Denny, the Rock Island, or someone else, remains a mystery.
Allen Denny’s original plat of Mokena, as done by Jeddiah Woolley.
After some skepticism from area residents that a train would ever run over the rails, pressure was applied to the company and the first passage through Mokena was made on Sunday, October 10th, 1852, as a grandiose woodburning locomotive named The Rocket puffed over the prairie. At this time, the depot was less than half built, and otherwise our hamlet was composed of merely two buildings, with a third slated to go up within a month. Mokenians were so excited by the trains that spunky 18-year-old Julia Atkins published the times of their arrivals in her handwritten Mokena Star, our first journalistic endeavor. So revolutionary was the new railroad connection, that two decades later, historian Woodruff wrote that “now we could go from Joliet in the morning, buy half the city (if we had the dimes) and return at night.”
Allen Denny came to gather a nest egg of no small means by selling off his lots to those who came to be near the new railroad and make their own fortune. Among these initial ventures was a store housed in a small, rustic stone building ran by Warren Knapp and a man remembered only as Smith, which sprouted up just before the subdivision was complete, as well as a nearby inn built by Carl Gall, who catered to the men who laid the iron rails. Blacksmith William McCoy followed by opening a workshop around the same time. Within a few years, the arrival of learned carpenter Bernard Folman of Luxembourg led to the construction of the first houses in Mokena. It’d be impossible to reconstruct exactly how much money Denny made by selling his lots, but what is sure, is that his name appears in graceful, swooping antebellum script on dozens if not hundreds of indentures filed in the Will County Recorder’s Office.
Soon after Allen Denny’s initial subdivision was laid out, neighbor John McGovney platted his own addition adjoining Denny’s to the east, with the new street running between the two being dubbed Division Street. As time went on, Denny tacked on more of his own additions, such as a large one in Christmastime 1853, which composed an area where a steam-powered mill would shortly thereafter be built east of the newly-named Mokena Street and south of the Rock Island tracks, as well as good sized parcels on the north side of First Street, as well as the areas along Second and Third Streets west of Division Street. Next came a second addition on the south side of the railroad, encompassing McGovney Street (known in Denny’s day as South Street) from today’s Wolf Road to Mokena Street, as well as a third addition in 1855 south of what came to called Denny Avenue.
One can view Allen Denny’s further sticking on of new additions to his town as an effort to maximize his profit in lot sales, but money wasn’t his sole goal, as is shown by his designation of a public square in 1855. A piece of ground surrounded on three sides by modern day Second Street, Union Street, and Third Street, legal papers from its release say it was “originally intended by the proprietor of Mokena as a plat for the erection of churches and other public buildings, required for the convenience of the inhabitants thereof, and the improvement of said village.” The document was signed by 25 male Mokenians and one lady resident, Abigail Gremmer.
In what is the oldest known photograph of Mokena, Allen Denny’s public square is seen around 1870. The first building to be erected on it was the village’s schoolhouse in 1855 at far left, followed by the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church in 1862 at far right, and the Methodist Church at center in 1867. St. Mary’s German Catholic Church, seen in the distance, was not part of the square.
Allen Denny was also one of the first businessmen in Mokena, running a dry goods and grocery business with one F.C. Herrick, possibly a relative of his first wife. All in all, fortune didn’t favor the partnership, and it fizzled out in the fall of 1854. Nevertheless, there are indications that Denny kept up the enterprise on his own at least into the Civil War days, but like most of the finer points of life in Mokena in his time, details of this concern are exceedingly hard to pin down. As Mokena was being born, our founder was still active in the temperance movement, a cause that had been near and dear to his heart for decades by this point. Serving as Vice President of the Mokena Temperance Society, Denny presided over a rollicking meeting held at the schoolhouse near John McGovney’s place on January 12th, 1854, where the new Maine Law was debated by two speakers. A pioneering piece of legislation that banned sales of alcohol in that state except for medicinal purposes, the society resolved that “the Maine Liquor Law is just, expedient and constitutional, and we pledge ourselves to use all honorable means to aid its enactment in Illinois.” Before the meeting wrapped up at 11 0’clock that night, 40 new members were added to the rolls of the society.
A man of no small stature in our young community, Allen Denny was often called on to wear many hats in Mokena, as was the case when his neighbor John Atkins passed away in 1864. As the LaPorte Road resident’s estate was being settled and the paperwork was being filed in the county seat, Denny was asked to help appraise certain pieces of the deceased’s property, first and foremost being a valuable set of bee hives. Within a year, the Civil War was over, and the dust settled in America. In 1871, Allen Denny went to New York and took up residence with his son Alonzo, where he stayed put. After more than a century and two score since his departure, his reason for reason for leaving Mokena is unclear. However, it does not appear that his wife Polly went with him; in fact, a legal document from the following summer stated that the two were “living separate and apart.” Were marital strains what drove him back to the Empire State? In any case, assigning any reasons to his move would only be speculation at this late date. So it came to pass that Allen Denny spent his final years back in Chautauqua County, where he passed away in his 85th year on October 29th, 1875. His demise was noted back in his Illinois home of Mokena, where our correspondent to the Joliet Republican sent in the news to the paper, hailing him as the “original founder of Mokena.” Denny’s bones rest in Chautauqua County, far from his adopted home in the Land of Lincoln and the community he built. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All the comforts, blessings and good fortune of our hometown are the legacy of Allen Denny. Our comfortable existence in one of Will County’s foremost communities we owe to his vision, this man who made the wilderness to blossom as the rose. He is the Father of Mokena, and may his memory reign supreme in our consciences.
