Along in the distant, far-off days of the First World War, a Joliet reporter called Mokena “the village of churches.” It was a fitting moniker, as at that time our community featured four houses of worship to nourish the souls of around 400 residents. Immanuel Lutheran, St. John’s and St. Mary’s, they’re all still here with the exception of our venerable Methodist church, with recently consolidated with our neighbors in the New Lenox congregation. These churches are landmarks in town, with the English gothic eminence of St. John’s as the jewel of Second Street, and Immanuel Lutheran’s modern edifice being unmissable on LaPorte Road. The contemporary style of St. Mary’s is prominent on 115th Avenue, but what sets this house of worship apart from its spiritual companions in Mokena is that its original sanctuary is still here, and not only that, but is still in use as a place of prayer, meditation, and devotion. So it has stood, nestled in a historic cemetery on a narrow tree-lined lane since the days of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. Its past is worthy of our close attention.
In the era leading up to the life-changing arrival of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad in 1852, our neck of the woods was strongly settled by German stock, most of whom were evangelical Lutheran, the robust group who would go on to the found the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church in 1862. Their neighbors, mostly Americans from the east, were more or less divided up into Methodist and Baptist assemblies, and would establish their own congregations before the decade was out. So it was that a Catholic minority remained in the newborn hamlet of Mokena, a mere eight years after its founding. A great step forward was made in the name of their faith on February 20th, 1860, when the father and mother of the parish, Prussian farmers Matthias and Margaret Enders, donated one acre of their property, a little ways north of Mokena, to the bishop of the Roman Catholic Church of Chicago. Almost exactly three years later, this original parcel would be supplemented by an additional acre donated to the bishop by the Enders’ neighbors, Johann and Anna Schmitt.
The small group of the faithful had the land to secure the future of their young parish, but still needed a foundation upon which to build, and for this they needed to bring in funds. The ways in which the money came into their coffers is somewhat hazy after the passage of more than a century and a half, but at least one ball was given to drum up cash, such as that held at Young’s Hall in Joilet in April, when Mokenians John Mahoney and Lawrence McMahan acted as managers. That night a ticket cost a dollar, (or about $25 in today’s money) and the music was supplied by Millspaugh’s Quadrille Band. By and by the congregation to-be had gathered enough money, and Bernhard Folman was engaged to build their house of worship. Folman, a Luxembourger and a Catholic, was a master carpenter whose hands built some of the earliest structures in Mokena. The lumber used in this modest structure was sourced from local timber, with the heavy window sills being made from the black walnut of our forests.
St. Mary’s German Catholic Church was completed in 1864 at the cost of $1,400, boasting of three long, narrow windows on its eastern and western sides, along with a tall, thin steeple showcasing flame-shaped pinnacles at its base, a piece of flair not often seen in simple country churches in those days. Such pioneers were those of this parish, that at is birth, St. Mary’s of Mokena was the only Catholic church between the county seat and southern Cook County. The first worship services were held in the new sanctuary under the guidance of Father Peter Fassbender, who gathered his flock once a month due to the fact that he had to travel to town in order to celebrate mass.
The original Catholic parish of Mokena was composed of a mere nine families, to which number almost certainly counted the Bavarian families of Andreas and Margaret Schuberth along with Johann and Regina Fleisner, in addition to the Prussian Enderses and Schmitts, not to mention the young Irish clan of Thomas Lewellyn. When St. Mary’s first saw the light of day, it was a divisive and painful time in our history, one that we can’t even begin to imagine in our complacent 21st century existences. The national bloodbath of the Civil War was in full swing and untold carnage was by then a regular occurrence, with the Battle of Chickamauga being less than a year past, where the lives of four Mokenians were offered up for the Union. That the church was founded in this specific period is inseparable with its history, and poses the question if the parish was born in these dark years as a direct result of the gloom in which our ancestors lived. At least two members of the tiny congregation bore arms in the service of the North, namely Henry Folman and George Schmitt, who later anglicized his surname to Smith. Decades later both would find eternal rest in the churchyard.
As is the case with every newborn religious body, there was a roll call of firsts. The inaugural baptism was that of Emilia Margaret Iten on February 23rd, 1864, likely before the church was even completed, while the first nuptials were that of the John Wachters that April. The quaint churchyard cemetery was consecrated the following year, when the ground was broken to receive the earthly remains of Johann Schmidt in September 1865, a figure in our history about whom comparatively little is known, other than that he almost certainly belonged to the founding Schmitt family. In those days, Matthias Enders served as the burial ground’s first sexton, maintaining a small graveyard that as of this writing has grown to contain more than 800 graves. An early incident at the cemetery drew considerable attention. On August 28th, 1879, a cortege bore the earthly remains of Joseph Kaiser to the cemetery, where he was to be laid to rest beside his departed wife. Painting an all too vivid picture of the proceedings, Mokena’s correspondent to the Joliet Weekly Sun described that “the grave had already been dug, (and) the remains placed on the timbers over the yawning little narrow house” when the somber occasion promptly went downhill. So it was that Kaiser, a farmer who lived east of town, had refused to take the sacrament of the Lord’s supper from the congregation’s priest, and going even further back, had renounced Catholicism. At this point the unnamed priest materialized, interrupted the funeral, and in no uncertain terms, banned Kaiser’s body from the cemetery. A “fierce contest” broke out between the priest on one side and the mourners on the other, and at the end of the day, Joseph Kaiser was buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Green Garden, a little over seven miles away. The whole incident didn’t go over well in Mokena at large, with our correspondent not mincing any words when he penned that “had the writer been interested, someone would have got hurt before leaving there.”
By 1878, around thirty families from Mokena and the outlying area worshipped at St. Mary’s altar under the leadership of Father Franz Sixt, who at the beginning of the decade had fought overseas in the Franco-Prussian War. Few are the details that we are left with on these early days of the parish, however one bizarre incident has survived the ravages of time, in which one James Gulpin burglarized the church in the summer of 1884. His eventual loot, reasons for the act, and even his eventual punishment are all long since forgotten. As the dawn of the twentieth century was on the horizon, the Mokena parish had prospered enough to have its first communion class, when Anna and Mary Aschenbrenner, Rosalie Kohl, Paul Rinke and Charles Schmidt took the sacrament together in the summer of 1897.
St. Mary's German Catholic Church as it appeared around 1910.
Fifty families from the village and surrounding environs were at home in the parish in 1907, at which time the Sunday school was re-organized by Father Theodore Gross. One had previously existed in the early days, but at the end of the 1870s it was described as “having a kind of recess.” In 1914, as the Great War erupted in Europe, the Franciscan order took over the parish; in the half century from its founding to that point it had been in the hands of the Diocesans, Redemptorists and Benedictines. By the following year, Cecelia Walsh was serving St. Mary’s as its organist and choir director, with her singers practicing in her nearby home on Third Street when winter cold kept them out of the church. Mrs. Walsh’s tenure in these positions is significant in the annals of Mokena, as she was at the helm for over three and half decades.
After the First World War, the church entered a time of time of improvement. Subsequent remodels of the old sanctuary were carried out in 1924, 1927 and 1939; somewhere in that era a sacristy was built onto the church, and new pews came in 1942. Not all was peaceful, however. In the dark hours of Wednesday morning, September 21st, 1921, a particularly nasty wind storm struck Mokena, which our News-Bulletin described as a “veritable gale” of “cyclonic proportions.” Trees were blown down, small outbuildings splintered to kindling wood, crops were damaged, and St. Mary’s was shifted about six inches off its foundation, with all the westerly windows being blown in. Not even two years later, lightning struck the building. The charge traveled down a lightning rod, but it wasn’t grounded and thus the bolt tore out a window frame and also ripped out a piece of plaster from the interior.
Boosting came in 1921 when the Catholic Women’s Club was formed, to which the ladies paid twenty-five cents a month in dues. These monies along with various raffles helped pay for carpeting in the church, as well as coal and electricity bills. Down the line in the years of the Second World War, they rechristened themselves the Sacred Heart League. In the mid 1920s, the congregation attempted to buy the old St. John’s German Evangelical Church with the aim of converting it into a hall, but their offer was shot down. Under the leadership of Father Theodore Wemhoff, a new building fronting on Wolf Road was built for this purpose just west of the cemetery in 1926. A substantial one-story structure, it measured in at thirty by seventy feet. The first play staged there was a four-part drama called “Molly Bawn”, put on by the DeSoto Players of Joliet. The News-Bulletin noted that “there was plenty of laughter and also a few tears.” Another early community event at the hall was a minstrel show that was staged that January by “a bevy of 26 pretty girls from St. Viator’s Church in Chicago.” As usual, the News-Bulletin gave a step-by-step review, noting that “the songs were right up to the minute and full of pep” and that the “Frisco and Charleston dances were cleverly executed.” However, in contrast to the first, this entertainment rubbed a few the wrong way, as the News-Bulletin frowned “the girlies were a little hard on poor Mokena when they cracked jokes about its sleepiness.” Over the years, St. Mary’s Hall echoed with levity and joy at countless card parties, bunco games, and movies, all of which raised funds for the church.
In the fall of 1928 confirmation was held for the first time, although the actual ceremonies took place in the county seat until 1954. In this era, the men of the cloth who tended to the parish didn’t actually live in Mokena, but traveled over the Rock Island from Joliet, or going even farther back, from Blue Island to celebrate mass in town. One of them, Father Roman, boarded with the Walsh family on Third Street when he came to town. A place had been made for him to stay overnight in the church, but he felt skittish about sleeping while surrounded by a cemetery.
An inseparable figure with the history of St. Mary’s is Mokenian George Marti, who sat on the church council. A devout convert to Catholicism, he took his seat in 1913, and kept it well into the 1950s. He was the parish’s jack of all trades, among other duties that became his was serving as janitor of the church, who started the fires before services. (This led to a startling incident in 1932 when he found an owl nesting in the coal-burning stove) Marti was also the cemetery’s groundskeeper, as well as managing the important task of ringing the church’s bell, along with tolling it when a congregant died. The bell would peal once for every year the decedent lived, working as a kind of announcement system to the village at large.
A big change came to St. Mary’s in 1948, when under the guidance of Father Benedict Pfeiffer OFM the hall was made over into two classrooms for the first Catholic school in Mokena history. It was truly a grassroots undertaking, as four men of the parish did much of the hard work themselves, those being the ever-present George Marti, along with Harold Miller, Elmer Schneider and William Weber Sr. September 6th, 1949 was opening day, when 27 students showed up for class. The Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart were the first teachers, handling grades one through six in one swoop. Sister Charlotte Goetze not only taught fourth through sixth grades, but was also the school’s principal, while Sister Constance Faulstich managed the three younger grades. A year later in 1950, two more grades were added during the tenure of Father Juniper Freitag OFM.
The 1950s were probably the most significant era in the history of the church aside from the days of the Enders family during the Civil War. Not only was a house directly north of the hall-turned-school bought from the Bennett family to be made into a convent for the sisters, (prior to this a tiny two-room apartment in the school was used) but also Father Cecil Koop OFM was on the scene right after New Year’s 1954. A new era was ushered in. When Father Cecil took the helm, the nearly century old church was bursting at the seams. The parish had shown great growth since the end of the Second World War, as the existence of a flourishing Catholic church in our small town was a draw for those looking to move to our community. In those days, St. Mary’s was regarded as the mother church to St. Anthony’s in Frankfort and St. Jude’s in New Lenox. In order to alleviate growing pains, more classrooms were built in the school, this time in the basement that had been added under the structure, and mass was moved from the 19th century church to be celebrated here on the Sabbath.
A colossal fundraising drive began, and a parcel of land was purchased on the southeast corner of 195thStreet and 115th Avenue, then a sparsely settled neighborhood on the fringes of Mokena. There ground was broken on January 6th, 1955, to build a new church and school, exactly a year after Father Cecil came to the parish. The first mass in the new church was celebrated at midnight on Christmas 1955, and ultimately the new church and school were dedicated on May 6th, 1956.
Small improvements came to the older, historic church over the years. In its centennial year of 1964 the cemetery was fenced in with chain link, and some of the old headstones were straightened up, while the church was given a new coat of paint. The windows and altar were also spruced up, but nothing of a substantially permanent nature was done. The old hall and school was torn down in the 1960s, and thus came the question – what of the old church? It didn’t see much use in the last half of the 1950s as well as throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
A touching postscript unfolded in the latter decade. As the historic church wasn’t getting any younger, the Joliet diocese planned to have the timeless structure knocked down. Many were those in Mokena who were incensed at these plans, and one villager, Ethel Cooper, narrowly saved the old house of worship an ignominious end at the wrecking ball. The widow of former mayor Everett Cooper, she met personally with the bishop to dissuade him, which proved to be an uphill battle. “They couldn’t understand why we would want to restore the church when we could build one for about the same price,” Mrs. Cooper remarked. Carrying on in an inspirational way, she said “We probably could’ve used the money for something else, but the point was to preserve the old and restore it if we could.” Bids for the planned work were taken, and the parish’s preservationists were reckoning with a $60,000 price tag. Nevertheless, inflation and other unforeseen happenings wound up pushing the final bill for the work up to $160,000. (Equal to over $870,000 today) Of this sum, a hefty amount was spent replacing the original foundation, along with siding and millwork, as well as rebuilding the church’s floor. Mokena piano man Ron Guendling also revived an ancient pump organ. A grant from the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration and various contributions from parishioners made the whole project possible. The newly restored St. Mary’s was dedicated in 1978, and through the ardor of Mrs. Cooper and that of other Mokenians, this priceless historic landmark is still with us. Still gracing its interior is the original Civil War era altar, along with the stations of the cross, which likely date from the same period.
St. Mary's during its much-needed restoration, circa 1976.
St. Mary’s current edifice on 115th Street was built in 1987, and is still in use to this day. However, the doors of the original, time-honored church still welcome the faithful, and when the atmosphere is just right, the days of yore are palpable, where 160 years of history hang in the air. In our prayers we remember the Enders family, along with the Fleisners, the Schuberths, the Schmitts, and all the other mothers and fathers of the parish, and give thanks to our forefathers who weathered the rocky seas of the last century and a half.
No comments:
Post a Comment