“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis force an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comfort th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”
So it was stated by Chicago humorist Finley Peter Dunne in his 1902 work Observations by Mr. Dooley. Although they sadly have mostly faded from the everyday life of a Mokenian in the year AD 2026, they are priceless historical documents, without the aid of which it would be impossible to chronicle the past. Readers of these pages will be well aware of your author’s deep affinity for Mokena’s old News-Bulletin, a tasty paper published for decades by our intrepid Semmler family. Human memories fail, important documents go missing, but the News-Bulletin stays behind to document events as they occurred, oftentimes by a writer who was there.
For all the glory and laurels that can be strewn upon the News-Bulletin, there was an even earlier paper on the scene in Mokena, one that is completely forgotten today, all memory of which is long since scattered to the wind. Allow ye scribe to introduce the Mokena Advertiser and its spunky young editor, Charles H. Jones.
The world welcomed Charles in 1856, his exact birthday long since lost to time. It was a mere four years after the arrival of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad and the birth of Mokena, and it was likely here that he was born. He was the first son of Noble Jones and Clarissa Farley, late of Canada and New York State respectively. Charles’ father was a man whose name is indelible from Mokena’s history; aside from later becoming a stock market man on the Chicago Board of Trade and one of our first city commuters, the elder Jones sealed his place into local history when he built a steam-powered grist mill at the Rock Island tracks in 1855 and later served two terms as village president.
When Charles Jones was a fresh-faced lad of two years, his father packed up and set out for the west, intending at first to head to Pike’s Peak, Colorado where he thought to run another mill, but instead got as far as Atchison, Kansas Territory, where it was deemed good enough to stay. Soon thereafter young Charles and his mother, joined the family patriarch where they resided until 1863. With the Civil War still in full swing, the Joneses moved back to Frankfort Township, where they farmed for a year, and in the final full year of President Lincoln’s administration came back to Mokena. With Noble Jones buying grain and shipping it over the rails to Chicago, lad Charles would have attended school in the one-room structure on the village’s public square, a historic structure that still stands to this day at 11121 Third Street.
Destiny found Charles Jones at the young age of eighteen, when he founded the Mokena Advertiser in 1874. It is the local historian’s lament that the era in which Charles and his Advertiser lived is one in which there are lots of blank spots. Therefore, it’s impossible to say where he got the idea for his publication, who funded it, who worked for him and even where in the village his office was located. As such, we’ll never have the full story, and only precious few original copies of the paper are known to still exist. Suffice to say, Mokena was a busy little railroad town in the 1870s. With the population composed mostly of Americans descended from eastern families and new Americans who arrived here by way of Germany and Switzerland, a rundown from the end of the decade of businesses in town listed, among others, five general stores, two blacksmith shops, two wagon shops, two harness shops, three hotels, and to sate the thirsty Germans, seven lager beer saloons.
Described as a “spicy little newspaper”, the Advertiser was easy to thumb through, being printed in a compact fashion on regular, standard sized sheets of paper. It appears to have been published weekly, although for a period in 1876 the editions were coming off the press semi-monthly before going back to the weekly rate. The extant numbers are each composed of a handful of pages of jaunty news, and true to its name, plenty of advertisements. Likely where the editor made most of his money, the ads are a who’s who of 1870s Mokena. The Advertiser of December 1875 contains a blurb from Nicholas Junker, who “repairs all kinds (of) clocks, watches, jewelry, &c. with neatness and dispatch, all work warranted.” (The family of this early businessman later anglicized the spelling of their surname to Yunker) In the same issue, the Moriarty Brothers of Mokena were “agents for the Cushman cable lightning rod, the best in use.” Charles Hirsch took out a big ad, spreading over nearly a quarter of a page. He boasted of “a full line of goods suitable for the fall trade”, those being namely “flannels, nubias, Balmoral and felt skirts, cotton and woolen hosiery, gloves, yarns, notions” as well as “knitted underwear, men’s and boys’ hats and caps, buck mittens” and more, which could all be had at “the very lowest prices.” In perusing the ads in the paper, the 21st century Mokenian will notice that no addresses are given, as the system of numbering buildings and houses was still seventy years away. Locations were given via landmarks, such as in the case of the aforementioned Nicholas Junker, customers could find him at the “first door east of Dr. Jump’s residence.”
The Advertiser printed items from correspondents in Frankfort and New Lenox, who submitted a few stories from their respective neck of the woods. That being said, the meat of the paper was Mokena news. To read their vivid testimony, the articles are a veritable time machine. A piece from the edition of October 1st, 1876 shows the occasional rough and tumble nature of Mokena’s saloons:
Ball Bawl.
The ball that was given in Jacob’s Hall, the 23rd was rather a romantic affair. Everything went as merry as a marriage bell until old Bacchus began to work: Then one would have thought all the Furies in the land has been loosened. The music played and the pugilists beat time upon each other’s heads, some with glasses, some with their fists and others with clubs. A lively time ensued for a space of an hour or so, when suddenly everything became serene; and only bruised heads, black eyes, broken noses, and dilapidated clothing, was left as a reminiscence of the hours work.
The Advertiser of August 1st, 1876 gives us a few snippets of the great gold rush then playing out in the Dakota territory:
Charlie Reitz and Jacob Weber…started for the Black Hills on the morning of the 24th, before the town was awakened from its slumbers both were well fixed.
Another column in the same issue goes on about the two lads:
Charlie Reitz and Jacob Weber, the two runaways have been heard from, a letter was received from Charlie dated Iowa City, he said they were on the tramp bound for the Black Hills, and out of money. But this is a hoax as it is known that he had $70 that he had confiscated from the old gent’s pile, and it is thought that he had in the neighborhood of $125.00 laid by for the excursion. We hope to hear favorable reports of the Hills from the boys.
LATER. – Since writing the above Jacob has returned, Charlie was seen in Chicago on the night of the 1st, and instead of going to the Hills, he will make for Michigan, if he does not come home.
The same edition of the Advertiser also gives the reader a taste of some trouble Editor Jones had with a publication from the county seat, namely the filching of his own work:
The Joliet Sun editor does not think enough of us to exchange, but still we are not left out in the cold, he occasionally steals a string of news from us and boldly publishes it under the head of “county news” just as though they had gathered it all alone. Now my Sun-ny boys, don’t do that again without telling where it comes from or we’ll limber up that back which has so much starch in it.
Finally, a blurb that lends to the modern-day reader the small town hominess of 19th century Mokena, when Charles Jones mentions a gift he received from the village’s Baptist parson:
Rev. Mr. Dibell has our sincere thanks for a pail brim full of Red Astrican apples.
The song of the Thresher goes up from our land.
On a spicy note, the pages of the Advertiser detail a long-forgotten feud between the young Jones and one Professor H.Y. Harding. History has left us few clues as to who Harding was and even fewer as to what had kindled the feud. A thorough combing of the 1870 federal census lists no one with this name residing in Mokena, greater Will County at large or the adjacent townships in southern Cook County. Whoever he was, he must have been a newcomer to town, and the only detail about him that have shone through the ages is that he seems to have been a singing instructor, and as of interest to Charles Jones, was the village correspondent to the Sun and Courier, both published in the county seat.
The whole row might have first gotten started when Harding threw a few barbs at his younger counterpart in the pages of the Sun. In the November 25th, 1875 edition of the paper, Harding repeated the words of a Frankforter who rued the delay of the printing of the latest issue of the Advertiser, attributing the hold up to Charles Jones being “delayed a little too long at Joliet.” Using snide words and speaking from a metaphorical high horse, Professor Harding addressed the Joliet reference (the exact meaning of which is lost on modern readers) and threw in his own two cents:
Whether the temporary sojourn of the editor in your city or the excessive hospitalities which were forced upon him was the cause, it is certain that he has succeeded in producing a newspaper which must be as astonishing to himself as to his readers. One sentence is composed of three hundred words with no stop longer than a comma to curb its turbid eloquence.
Two weeks later, the professor struck again, mentioning in his column that “…the editor of the Advertiser has developed a talent for “cuss words” which the godly deplore, and which must prove disastrous to his moral and physical health.” Shots had been fired across the Advertiser’s bow, and now the ball was in Charles Jones’ court. Being a newspaper editor, he had no better place to voice his rebuttal than in the pages of his Mokena paper. In the December 1875 edition of the Advertiser, Jones penned that “Prof. H.Y. Harding is very kind in saying such nice things about us; but never mind, we never got so low as to be connected with a drunken bar-room fight; and everybody knows he has been.” Going on in another column in the same issue, Jones said:
The Professor (?) persists in screwing and twisting his mouth and face into all the most hideous shapes possible, - like the wild savages of the far west; when engaged in a war dance, - every time he catches our eye when he passes the office. He thinks by so doing it hurts us; but, no it does us good. It makes us happy to the very bottom of our heart. It confirms that he is a d—m fool, and he’s making the thing worse every day of his life.
Charles Jones wasn’t beating around the bush as far as his true feelings about Professor Harding. As all of this was unfolding, an unknown Mokena scribe who sent in news to the Joliet Republican came to Jones’ rescue, and didn’t mince his or her words:
In the last few issues of both the Sun and Courier, their correspondent (Prof. (?) H.G.(sic) Harding) has had considerable to say about the Mokena Advertiser and its editor. If the writer of those articles was a man of good standing, and the public in general, thought anything of him, I would take it to heart. But as it is, he is a worthless whelp, a professional dead-beat, and a lager beer guzzler, and has no respect for himself nor fellow citizens, and no reputation to maintain. Therefore his articles will have no weight among the better class of our townsman. Hereafter, I shall pay no attention to what he says as I don’t deem him worthy of notice.
So it was, that a strife among neighbors is one of the few chapters from the paper to have survived the ravages of time. All in all, the Advertiser was in print for three years, from 1874 to 1877. On May 20th of that year, editor Charles Jones was struck down in the prime of his life by the dreaded malady of consumption. He was laid away in his family’s plot in Marshall Cemetery, and when an obituary for him appeared in Chicago’s Inter Ocean, he was hailed as a “young man of unblemished character, a rising young journalist, and an energetic businessman.” The city paper went on to state that “…he is widely known in this section of the state, and his loss will be severely felt.”
With the passing of Charles Jones, his Advertiser faded into history. Interestingly, in the decade or two after young Jones’ departure, another publication called the Mokena Advertiser sprung up. Not much is known about this enterprise, other than that a newspaper called Will County Commercial Advertiser was already in existence by 1878, its headquarters being in Lockport. It can be posited that this second incarnation of Mokena paper could have been a sub-publication under the Lockport paper’s umbrella, as other Advertisers could be found towards the end of the 19th century being issued in towns such as Frankfort and Minooka. In any case, all the historian of the 21st century can do is make theories. While only a precious few issues of the original Advertiser have survived the tides of time, they provide us with a priceless window into the Mokena of yore. This author likes to think that Charles Jones would be happy to know that he left us with the flavor of his days.
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