From Hardware to Hot Shaves: The Story of 11014 Front Street

   Viewed as a whole, Mokena is divided up into lots and blocks, looking like a cross section of squares and rectangles. If we see it as a surveyor’s plat map, it is sliced up like a pie. Considered with a more flavorful bend, the individual flavor and persona of each slice can be fully appreciated. To look at the history of each lot in town, is to be face to face with our narrative on a grand scale. Taken as an example, 11014 Front Street is no different, boasting of a rich story that goes back almost 160 years. 

   This tale begins with the humble family of Andreas and Margaret Schuberth, late of the tiny northern Bavarian village of Wolfersgrün. They arrived in our environs in 1847, as part of the great Germanic wave of emigration to eastern Will County in that era. They settled here in a world where neither Mokena nor Frankfort yet existed, nor was there any township government to speak of. The railroads that would come to crisscross our neighborhood were but a distant dream. By 1862, the Schuberths had prospered and owned a farm of no small means on today’s 191^st Street, just east of the modern intersection of Route 45. 

 

   Aside from being early settlers to what would later become Mokena, the Schuberths also earned their place in history by being one of the founding families of the St. Mary German Catholic Church in 1864. Four years earlier, a federal census taker recorded Andreas and Margaret on their homestead with a family of four living children, ranging in age from 22 to 14. Their oldest, John, was working as a carpenter. As the Civil War began, he struck out on his own and moved to Mokena, a young and growing community that had only existed for ten years. Decades later, it would be recalled through the haze of time that John Schuberth erected a building at today’s 11014 Front Street in 1862. Typical for its era, this quaint two-story structure housed his new hardware store, and was fitted out with living quarters not only above it, but also in a small wing on the building’s east side.

 

Having formerly stood at today's 11014 Front Street, this ca 1910 image shows the historic structure was built by John Schuberth in 1862. (image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

   The Schuberth family became firmly rooted in business affairs of 19^th century Mokena, as John’s younger brother Nicholas opened a long-lasting saloon not far from the hardware store around 1870. John was doing well enough by 1872 to take out a large ad in that year’s county directory, in which he described himself as a “dealer in general hardware, iron, nails, copper and sheet iron ware”, as well as highlighting the stoves and agricultural implements he had on hand. Further illustrating the array of goods that could be had at the store was an insert that appeared four years later on the front page of the Mokena Advertiser, that boasted “John Schuberth would inform his friends and the public generally, that he has just put upon the floor in his store the largest and most complete assortment of cooking ranges, stoves, parlor hard and soft coal and wood burners ever shown in Mokena or surrounding towns.”

 

This ad from John Schuberth's hardware store appeared in an 1872 Will County directory.

 

   A respected man in our community, in the spring of 1882 the town solons appointed John Schuberth the village’s police magistrate. As Mokena had no established police department to speak of at the time, the hardware dealer presided over cases of local legal infractions that were brought before him by the town constable. Typical instances were those of alcohol-fueled mayhem that occurred when area farmhands came to town to ring in the weekend in Mokena saloons. Involvement of the owners of this property in village law enforcement would become a common thread in its history, and would be seen in more than one figure in its future. 

 

   In addition to selling iron goods of just about every description imaginable, John Schuberth demonstrated his versatility by becoming an agent for steamship travel by 1888.  Somewhere in the sunset of the 19^th century he moved to Chicago, where he branched out into real estate. He lived there for the rest of his life, before breathing his last in 1927 at the age of 89, three decades past the life expectancy for an American male in this time. 

 

   As is so often the case with our history, there are a series of blank spots in the narrative of this property, things only coming back into focus with the emergence of a Mokenian named Jacob M. Zahn. The scion of an old Mokena family, he took up ownership of a new hardware store in this spot sometime in the years leading up to 1900. Zahn’s business here was successful, and in the spring of 1904 he began to carry the new-fangled spiral washing machine manufactured in Tinley Park, which users declared to be “the best made.” In 1901, mere three years after telephones made their debut in the village, the Northwestern Telephone Company put a switchboard in Jacob Zahn’s hardware store, it being operated by the faithful shopkeep and his wife, Alice. A news report from that fall described Jacob as being “busy as a hive of bees” in his diligent work manning the board. 

 

   Zahn also took a seat on the village board as a town trustee in 1897, a local office he held until 1905. His popularity amongst town folk is evidenced by the election held in the spring of 1903, when he received a whopping 50 votes from the men of Mokena, at a time when our population was barely 300. During his time as trustee, he worked on various projects around town, including the 1898 construction of our first water tower, which stood for many years on Front Street, just east of its intersection with Division Street. 

 

   Jacob Zahn was a well-known Mokena businessman in his day, but he was not blessed with good health. In the fall of 1904 he was bowled over with particularly severe case of bronchitis which resulted in his traveling to a “fresh air camp” in Ottawa in the early weeks of the following year. He manifested signs of improvement there, and also procured a tent in which he lived upon his return to Mokena to continue the treatment. However, in spite of all the efforts of early 20^th century medicine, severe hemorrhages developed, and he expired at his Front Street home on May 31^st, 1905, a young man of 38 years. Leaving behind his wife Alice and two young daughters named Viola and Pearl, his mortal remains were interred beneath the green sod of St. John’s Cemetery just outside the village. 

 

   That autumn, Alice Zahn sold the hardware store to Fred and William Niethammer of Kankakee County, while not only keeping ownership of the apartments in the building, but also continuing to run the telephone switchboard. Soon after they set down their stakes here, in the fall of 1907 village correspondent William Semmler of the Joliet Weekly News, referred to the two brothers as “wide awake hardware dealers”, and that October William bought out Fred’s interest in the store, who then went to work in Chicago, before ultimately becoming an Indiana farmer. Like those who went before him at this location on Front Street, William became active in local affairs and cared deeply about our community. He came to be an important part of St. John’s Brotherhood, a men’s organization of the church, where he served as chairman of the building committee when the new church was dedicated in 1923, as well as a school trustee and clerk of the local camp of the Modern Woodmen of America.  Like John Schuberth before him and those who would come after him at this spot, Niethammer had a hand in law enforcement in Mokena, being appointed police magistrate in the spring of 1907 by the village board. Aside from patriarch William, the Niethammer family was composed of matriarch Ida, and their two children Ruth and Hugo. The family came to live in a roomy, historic house on First Street, lending their name informally to the narrow stretch of today’s Midland Avenue that ran north to Third Street from their homestead. 

 

William Niethammer of Mokena, circa 1922. 

 

   The tenure of William Niethammer brought modernity to the old hardware store, with glistening electric light being installed for the first time in August 1913. His business withstood the trying years of the First World War, before Niethammer ultimately closed up shop in the early 1920s. The last hardware enterprise to be housed here was the store of young Mokena brothers Milton and Roy Krapp, who moved their concern two doors to the west when they traded the property to local newcomer Walter Fisher in the spring of 1923, who opened a general store here. A fresh-faced man of 26 years, Fisher was born in the Russian Empire of Jewish heritage, before he and his family flocked to America’s shore in the early part of the 20^th century, likely in an effort to escape the czar’s hostility to people of their faith. Having first come to Mokena by way of Joliet with his wife Ethel and two little daughters in 1922, Walter Fisher’s store handled everything from pail candy, union suits to fancy dress suspenders, as well as phonographs, at the going rate of $98 (or about $1,500 in today’s money) and individual records for 49 cents each. 

 

   Following the already long-established pattern of owners with law enforcement connections, Walter Fisher was appointed a Will County Sheriff’s deputy at the end of 1922 to combat Prohibition era bootlegging in the neighborhood. During his tenure he did much to fight crime in and around the village, his biggest moment being when he and Mokena constable John Frisch intercepted a truckload of illicit booze passing through the community in March 1923. Alas, Walter Fisher is one of the most tragic figures in our town’s history. While pursuing a car thief in April 1926, the Front Street storekeeper-turned lawman was shot and killed just outside Orland Park. As a hero in Mokena’s story, it bears noting that nothing in the village, neither street nor park nor public building, bears Walter Fisher’s name in memory of his fearless sacrifice. This is a glaring omission in our community. For the complete account of this case and Deputy Fisher’s life, the reader is directed to this author’s 2018 book The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery.

 

Walter Fisher, a hero in Mokena's history, seen here around 1920. 

 

   In the wake of Fisher’s untimely death, the property was host to several short-lived enterprises. Not only did Ethel Fisher carry on her husband’s store here for a brief period, but Fred and Alma Brown had opened a rooming house in the upstairs of the building by the end of the decade as well as a combined ice cream shop and snack shop in the structure’s one-story eastern wing. Operating at the same time in main western side of the building was the oft-forgotten Bethard Chevrolet dealership. In the crisp early morning hours of November 2^nd, 1929, a guest of Lizzie Moriarty, who lived in the house immediately east of the property in question, was jarred from her slumbers by the sounds of breaking glass and the acrid smell of smoke. Fearing the worst, she woke Mrs. Moriarty, who went outside and discovered that the west side of the Fisher building was engulfed in flames. In the way in which it can only be done in a small town, word of mouth stirred the volunteer fire department to life, who sounded their alarm on the village water tower a few doors to the east, and in no time they were out in full force, with a crowd of sleepy onlookers to boot. In what would prove to be one of the most spectacular fires in Mokena’s chronology, the firemen vigorously fought a blaze that would be momentarily tamed, only for it to reignite time and again in another part of the sprawling building. The News-Bulletin glumly quipped that the fire “was a stubborn one”, and that the flames “appeared to be between the walls.” All the equipment belonging to the Bethard dealership was lost to the conflagration, as was everything in the Browns’ section of the building, who carried no insurance to offset their loss.  

 

   By the time the last ember winked out, the story was only just beginning. Almost two weeks after the fire, the state fire marshal showed up in town, who had more than a passing interest in Mr. Bethard, whose first name has been lost to time. In an interesting detour to the story, it turned out that Bethard hadn’t been seen in Mokena since the fire, and that he was in no small amount of debt. To top things off, he had recently invested in an establishment called The Green Gables just south of the village at today’s Wolf and LaPorte Roads that the News-Bulletin referred to as a “roadhouse”, implying in the lingo of the day that shady business was afoot there. Stories were making the rounds in town that illegal alcohol was could be had there, with the News-Bulletin winking to its readers that “quite fast company was seen there” and that “the place was open all night and looked like one of New York’s famed night clubs.” Talk of Bethard’s alleged speakeasy even came up at a village board meeting, where it was intimated that “gun play” had taken place there between a scorned husband and his wife’s supposed lover. 

 

  Mokena was agog, and the gossip titillated residents. How much of it beheld the truth was never ascertained, but Mr. Bethard re-surfaced in time to communicate from Chicago to the News-Bulletin that he vehemently denied everything that was being attributed to him, and declared that he was “trying hard to get on his feet again” after the Front Street fire. In any case, he never went back into business in Mokena. The burnt hulk of this historic Front Street building was unable to be saved, and was ultimately knocked down.   

 

   In the aftermath of the 1929 fire, the lot sat vacant for years as life carried on without it. In time it became an overgrown tangle of foliage, with one account in the News-Bulletin describing it as a “young forest” in 1945. At this point in the narrative, we can open the books to a new chapter in the history of this property. Enter now the family of Anthony and Evanis Dina, both natives of Chicago. When the Dinas first arrived in our midst in 1947, they became one of the first settlers of the new Sunny Acres subdivision, which sprouted up north of the village proper in the days after the Second World War. The Dinas came to raise five children in the community, while Tony, as he was called by those who knew him, was a barber by trade, having first taken up the scissors when he was nine years old. All paths led to his becoming a tonsorial artist, for the young Chicagoan attended barbering school at the age of 13, and became the proud owner of his barber’s license as a 17-year-old. Part of the revered Greatest Generation, Dina served in the Marine Corps for one year during the war, before getting a medical discharge on account of a spinal injury suffered during judo training. 

 

   Tony Dina hung out his shingle in Mokena, and in 1950, had a new building erected of concrete blocks on the foundations of the old Fisher building on Front Street. His first local customer was the shop’s builder, who got a trim while sitting on a sawhorse. A year later their home subdivision was struck by a nasty tornado, and while the Dinas and their property were lucky enough to be spared, matriarch Evanis felt the family would be safer living in the confines of the village. So it was that comfortable living quarters were added onto the north end of the barber shop soon after, and the Dinas moved home and hearth to town.

 

The former barbershop of Tony Dina at 11014 Front Street.

 

  Tony Dina’s barbershop was quite the busy place in Mokena, and by 1955 had the luxury of not only being air conditioned, but also had a TV that customers watched as they waited their turn in the chair. The shop was very much a family place, where no racy mens’ magazines could be found, and no rough language would be tolerated, as it was common for village lads to stop in to have their ears lowered. Dina was a man who built relationships with his customers, as he was known on occasion to pack his tools into an old doctor’s bag and visit them if they should happen to be at Silver Cross Hospital, doling out haircuts, shaves and facial massages while refusing to take any payment for the same. 

 

  In his decades of residence in Mokena, Dina became a pillar of our community. He was active with the town chapter of AmVets here he served as post commander, was a founder of our Civil Defense Unit, and even served as a village trustee from 1967 to 1975. Adding to this already impressive list of accomplishments, he was a volunteer police officer, and later took a seat on the village’s police commission. Evanis Dina, known as a very caring and compassionate woman, made history when she received an appointment as our community’s first policewoman, a position in which she wore a badge issued by the town government.   

 

An idyllic scene of 1950s Mokena, Tony Dina Sr at left, with his brother Dominick on the right. The home of Mrs. Lizzie Moriarty can be seen behind them, which still stands at today's 11008 Front Street. (image courtesy of Dominick Dina)

 

  1968 saw Tony Dina Jr come to work in his Dad’s shop, cutting hair in the chair next to his father. After more than three decades years of serving Mokena, Tony the Elder retired in 1981. Tony Jr took up the torch and kept up the business in the time-honored shop on Front Street, where he was known far and wide for his adherence to the old traditions of the barbering trade. Tony Dina Sr passed away in 1989 in what would have been his 80^th year, followed by his wife Evanis, who reached the dignified age of 98, in 2016. 

 

   Many are the people in Mokena’s narrative who have some attachment to 11014 Front Street, be it business owners, customers of long standing, or simply residents who have considered the buildings here, be it the old barbershop or the much older building that went up in smoke in 1929, to be old landmarks. A fair number of the stories of these places have been remembered, being inscribed upon the old pages of local history, while others have disappeared into the ether, with all those who remembered them having long since crossed the great beyond. This historic property is now for sale, and soon, a new owner will be on the scene. Maybe the old barbershop will be mercilessly erased from our landscape like so many of the other landmarks that have graced Mokena. Whatever happens, let us never forget those who came before. 

Skyscraper of the Prairie: the Mokena Grain Elevator

   Mokena is built upon a solid foundation of agricultural bedrock. Farmers were the lifeblood of our community for well over a century, and when one looks in just the right places, traces of this old way of life can still be found amongst the blur of modern suburban living. One building in the heart of the village is a stalwart reminder of this heritage. The steel-clad eminence rises behind Mokena Street’s Eggcetera café, standing defiant against the tide of time, the weathered metal sign across its side reading “Ebert Farm Service” bearing mute witness to its former purpose. Turning the pages of history even further back, this hulk served as a grain elevator, a place where our farmers stockpiled their harvest. It may be hard to imagine a time when this old structure wasn’t here, keeping watch over Front Street and the Rock Island tracks, but it’s not even the first grain elevator to stand on this site. 

 

The Mokena grain elevator, a village landmark for over 135 years. 

 

   What can verily be called the first industry in Mokena started on this spot as early as 1855, a mere three years after the village was first platted, when early entrepreneur Noble Jones and his uncle, Cyrus Cross, had a flour and saw mill built here. These two men are inseparable with the early development of our community, and did business under the name of their firm, Cross & Jones. Alas, this enterprise’s success wasn’t written in the stars, and by 1858 the steam-powered mill had eaten up all of Noble Jones’s savings, and the concern winked out. After a succession of other owners, the huge structure was gutted and converted into a grain elevator in 1865, with the end of the Civil War. 

 

   The world of our forefathers was one of wood and open flame, that on one hand brought shelter, heat and comfort to their lives, but on the other, could prove to be the scourge of their existence. The many disastrous fires that dot the history of Mokena starkly attest to this. Business hummed along at the local elevator until the dreadful winter’s night of February 26^th, 1884, when one of the worst conflagrations on record occurred. At about 11:30 that night, while returning from a party in one of the village saloons, resident William Miller in some way happened across a fire that had started in a corner of the structure’s basement. According to the Mokena correspondent to the Will County Advertiser, Miller “immediately gave the alarm” and in no time the fire brigade and a large number of village dwellers materialized on the scene. Our community’s ladies were in fine form, and the same correspondent described “the zeal and energy shown by a number of our very best women in carrying water”, while the writer lamented what he saw as a lackadaisical effort by a few of Mokena’s men, who “stood around with their hands in their pockets.” A real scribe with a flair for the dramatic, he ended his reportage with the quip “Bah with such specimens of Homo.”

 

    Despite the sweat and toil exerted by the Mokenians who fought the fire that night, it was all for naught. The blaze made short work of the wooden building, and despite the best efforts of those who came to fight the flames, the granary was completely destroyed. Five railroad carloads of grain stored inside also went up in smoke. By the time all was said and done, the total monetary loss of the elevator alone came out to about $3,000 or close to $88,000 in today’s figures. Villagers were at a loss as to how to explain the origin of the fire, and in time it came to be assumed that it was the work of an arsonist.

 

   In the aftermath of the conflagration, a heap of scorched timbers and an empty foundation marked the site. From this smoldering ruin arose a new edifice, a marvelous phoenix from the ashes. This rebirth was had at the hands of John A. Hatch, a man whose mark is still visible in more than one place in our community. Readers of this page will be familiar with him, a lifelong Mokena area resident who was born in the wilds of the yet-unnamed Frankfort Township on February 27^th, 1842, and who later served as a hero in President Lincoln’s army at the siege of Vicksburg with great distinction. After the end of the Civil War, he married Nancy Matilda McGovney and together the couple brought nine of children into the world. A wearer of many hats in town, John A. Hatch also served as Mokena’s first village clerk upon incorporation in 1880.

 

   Hatch had already been a grain buyer in Mokena before the 1884 fire, and on June 25^th of that year, he paid the princely sum of $700 for the site upon which the old elevator had stood, a fee which included the remnants of the original building’s foundation, along with track and wagon scales and some outbuildings that still stood. Construction then began on a new granary, one of the biggest projects in the history of the village up to that point. Piece by piece, it rose over the roofs of Mokena, and when it was finally completed by the beginning of that September, the faithful village correspondent to the Advertiser was given a personal tour of the premises by John Hatch. In the lines of the paper, with great pride in his voice, he reported that:

 

“All is in readiness to receive grain. The power and shafting have been put in, and ascending to the upper floor we peered down into the depths of eight large bins with chutes accessing two separate elevators, one for oats and one for corn. Everything is handled by machinery, and the turning of two or three levers puts the grain in any part of the building from the basement to the top, or into the cars. In front of the elevator a set of railroad track scales has been put in, and also a set of platform scales has been put it in at the office. Altogether the elevator is complete in every detail. We have reason to be proud of it!”

 

   John A. Hatch kept a thriving business at this location and in the small grain office just west of the elevator, the front door of which opened to Mokena Street. He was still going strong 15 years later, when a November 1899 ad in the Advertiser stated that his firm bought grain and paid the highest market prices, sold hard as well as soft coal, (from which most of the town gained its heat) as well as all kinds of feed and did “grinding on the most reasonable terms.” 

 

The granary of John A. Hatch, seen here around 1900. Mr. Hatch stands in the foreground.

 

   In July 1902, wishing to devote all of his energy to the flourishing general store he also kept in the village, Hatch sold the granary and its associated businesses to William Henry Bechstein of Seneca. While the exact details of the transaction weren’t openly discussed in town, some said that the elevator must’ve changed hands for around $5,000. While Bechstein was late of LaSalle County, he was an old Mokena boy at heart, having been born here of robust agricultural stock on February 13^th, 1872, later being wed with Emma Cappel, daughter of a long-established Mokena family in 1895. A former employee of John Hatch’s, W.H. Bechstein was an old hand at the grain business, having been involved in this trade while he lived in Seneca, while a contemporary of his confidently wrote that Bechstein “understands the business from A to Izzard” and that he was “a hustler and a young man of the strictest integrity.” The same writer gushed that the grain man was “genial and obliging, and therefore popular with all. Mokena gains by securing him and his good wife as citizens.” 

 

   The name of W.H. Bechstein is one that is writ large in the village’s history. One of the most prominent citizens of Mokena in his day, not only did he run the grain elevator in the early 20^th century, he was also one of the founders of the Mokena State Bank in 1909, serving as its first secretary and much later having ascended to the president’s chair. Bechstein was an active Freemason, a dedicated member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church, and was also associated with the village camp of the Modern Woodmen of America. He amassed no small fortune through his business ventures in town, and would also later be remembered as the owner of the first auto in Mokena, a Ford touring car which he purchased in the spring of 1912. 

 

   Towards the end of 1903, after having had ownership for a little over a year, W.H. Bechstein set out to improve the elevator. First, he had a new roof put on the massive structure, then ordered a new 12,000 pound hopper scale for use in weighing grain into railroad cars. By the end of February 1904, Bechstein’s concern was also the proud new owner of a six horse power gas fueled engine. The next year, a fresh business venture enticed the agriculturist back to Seneca, where he purchased a large share in another grain firm. Back in Mokena, the spring of 1905 saw the elevator rented to none other than John A. Hatch, who set forth grinding feed with his adolescent son Alfred. In November of that year, W.H. Bechstein formally sold the elevator along with its grain and coal business to Frank and Charles Liess, two Mokena brothers who also kept a general store on Front Street. They spent a total of $7,500, which included not only the stock on hand, but also figured in Bechstein’s recent improvements to the property. The Liesses had already dabbled in grain in our neck of the woods by this time, but were hindered by the fact that up to this point, they had no storage buildings to speak of. 

 

   Alas, the Liess chapter of the granary’s history is a brief one. As history often returns to familiar faces, our old friend W.H. Bechstein and is family moved back from Seneca to their old Mokena stomping grounds after only having been away for three years. On the crisp first day of 1908, papers were signed and Bechstein re-acquired the granary with its coal and feed business, and was soon back in action. By the end of the month, things were humming to such a degree that one Friday night, the machinery in the elevator was kept running until well past midnight, filling railroad cars with shelled corn. A man with an eye for betterment, Bechstein also had the elevator painted red in this era. 

 

The grain elevator during the W.H. Bechstein years, circa 1910. 

 

   The granary was a focal point for our farmers, and a place from which a good chunk of their income came. A typical case would be that of Dan Lauffer, who sold his first batch of oats for the 1910 season to Bechstein, and received 33 cents per bushel. Things were especially good for farmers six years later, when upon shipping the season’s first load of corn to the Chicago market in November 1916, Bechstein paid the highest price for the crop in Mokena since the Civil War, a hefty dollar a bushel to Conrad Bettenhausen.

 

   For the second time in the elevator’s history, the terror of fire struck again. On Sunday morning, November 5^th, 1916, Elmer Cooper, a newly minted garage owner, saw smoke pouring out of a barn that was near the granary. It was known that a horse was trapped inside, and local auctioneer Herbert Moriarty was the first on the scene to try to rescue the helpless animal, but was beat back by the dense clouds of smoke. The horse, badly burned and asphyxiated, was eventually dragged from the burning barn with a rope. A Frankfort veterinarian was summoned, but nothing could be done for the poor beast, who died that night. 

 

   While World War I was being waged overseas, its effect was also being felt in Mokena. In January 1918, the village was in the grip of a pronounced coal shortage, that also coincided with one of the worst blizzards in the community’s history. With hardly any coal to be had from local dealers, some residents were taking to soaking old ashes in their stoves with oil to gain their heat. Not wanting to leave his fellow town folk in the lurch, W.H. Bechstein took to selling wood cut to stove size to his customers in this time frame, which was better than no fuel at all. By February things had gotten a little better, but still weren’t quite where they should’ve been. On the morning of the first of the month Bechstein received a railroad car’s worth of soft coal, and by noon, it was all gone, after having been parsed out to 75 customers. 

 

   After having been in business at this old Mokena location for a combined total of 21 years, W.H. Bechstein had paid his dues and was ready to rest open his laurels. On August 7^th, 1926 he sold the elevator and its concerns to his brothers in law, Fred and Albert Cappel. They had much in common with Bechstein, as the two brothers, aside from being his kin, were also born into an old Mokena family that had much to do with the building up of the village. In Albert Cappel’s youth, he had also been an employee of Bechstein’s at the elevator.  As their predecessors did, Cappel Bros. handled grain, feed, as well as salt and tile, not to mention the all-important coal to boot. The latter they were known to deliver house to house, a service that yet a handful of Mokenians can still remember. A 1928 appendix of Mokena businesses called Fritz Cappel, as he was known, a “live, progressive man” in the village, while the same authority called his younger brother “one of the prominent young business men” in town. 

 

A 1929 advertisement for the local business of Fred and Albert Cappel.

 

   Cappel Bros. steered their business through the hard years of the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, the elevator went through a succession of hands, including the partnership of Robert Hohenstein and Harold Schuldt, who bought the granary from the Cappels in the first days of 1946. By the time of their tenure, the old elevator was starting to show its age, so a new aluminum roof was put on and the sides of gargantuan building were clad in steel, which is still in place to this day. At the time of these improvements, it was noted that the elevator had a capacity of 15,000 bushels of grain. In this timeframe, the old grain office just west of the elevator was pulled down and replaced by a bigger, steel-sided building.

 

   A new page in the history of this time-honored property was turned when Robert Niemann sold the elevator in 1966 to Chester and Dorothy Ebert. Chet, as he was known by more than a few around town, has a place in Mokena’s history that is just as venerated as John Hatch and W.H. Bechstein’s. A true son of the soil, he was born in August 1918 on a farm in Frankfort Township that stood on today’s St. Francis Road. After his family moved further north to a different farm north of the current intersection of 191^st Street and 88^th Avenue, as a lad he went to school at the old one room Summit Hill schoolhouse, and later became an alumni of Mokena’s two year high school. Like so many others of this Greatest Generation, Chet Ebert rose to our country’s defense during the Second World War, having served the duration in the Army Air Corps, spending nearly three years in Panama. 

 

Chester Ebert, far right, inspecting a corn crop in September 1963. (image courtesy of Ruth Welzen)

 

   In the years after the war, Ebert was no stranger to business in our community, and was already a familiar face here when the elevator came into his family’s hands in the 1960s. As early as 1946, he started a concern in a simple building just east of the grain elevator, selling limestone to area farmers, which they used to enrich their soil. In 1950, Chet Ebert took on Warren Mancke of Tinley Park as a business partner for a brief period and expanded into a phosphate service, becoming a pioneer in this line. Phosphate was favored by local agriculturists who valued it for its use as a fertilizer, who would receive it delivered by Ebert, who would also spread it in their fields. To accommodate his growing business, the same year Chet Ebert had a large storage bin built just to the east of the grain elevator, it measuring 25 feet high by 16 feet in diameter, with a respectful capacity of 175 tons. 

 

   Aside from being a successful Mokena businessman, Ebert wore many hats in town as a respected local leader, having a seat on the boards of Immanuel Lutheran church, Mokena Public School, the Will County Farm Bureau, as well as the village board of trustees from 1969 to 1973. In conjunction with the phosphate business, he also founded Ebert Farm Service, which for many years operated out of the steel-clad building on Mokena Street immediately west of the grain elevator. A wide array of products could be had here, all reflective of the needs of Mokenians in this era. A 1976 ad listed everything from “feed, seed, grain, fertilizer and horse supplies” to “lawn and garden supplies”, making the store truly a one-stop shop for villagers. 

 

The grain elevator and Ebert Farm Service on Mokena Street, as they appeared in the 1970s. (image courtesy of Ruth Welzen)

 

   The family business reached into the end of the 20^th century, when Chet Ebert’s daughter Ruth, and her husband Dave Welzen, took over the former Ebert Farm Service in 1981 and re-christened it The Feed Bucket, to let Mokenians know that the concern was under new ownership. The Welzens started out primarily selling livestock feed, which would come to town on pallets, which would be stacked inside the now century-old grain elevator. Live ducks, geese and turkeys were also for sale here, along with baby chicks, which a visitor to the store would find in wooden crates bathed in golden light. 

 

   The era in which The Feed Bucket existed, was a time of great change for Mokena. With the population climbing to astronomical heights, the village was rapidly changing from the rural farm town it had been for generations to a Chicago suburb. By the 1990s, Main Street America was in decline as big box stores made their headway into our environs. One of the many casualties of this unfortunate development was The Feed Bucket, which ultimately shut its doors on Mokena Street in 1996. 

 

   Today we can look back over a century and half of history at this storied location. Most of the figures that make up the long narrative of this landmark we can only see through the hazy eye of memory. Their contributions to our community were great, and they deserve our dearest reverence. The grain elevator still stands triumphant, a monument to their love, work and lives in Mokena. 

Pioneer Scribe: The Story of Julia Atkins and the Mokena Star

    Looking back upon Mokena’s history, prominent names are sprinkled throughout the pages, such as that of Allen Denny, the founder of our village, or Ozias McGovney, the first mayor. Well over a century after their deaths, we still benefit from their ardor and dedication, their deeds having made their memory immortal. Where would our appreciation of the past be, if not for those who labored equally as hard to note it? Their roles are just as important in our narrative; without them we’d know nothing of our heritage. One young lady stands above other writers in her time, and the role of Julia Atkins as the editor of the Mokena Star, our then-newly born community’s first journalistic endeavor, is one that has left us with an irreplaceable view into her world.  

    To understand Julia, one must know her roots. She was born July 28^th, 1834, the same year her father and grandfather settled the wild, untamed prairie where Mokena would later stand. Both Vermonters named John Atkins, the new Illinoisans could count their neighbors using only one hand. The historic record indicates that John Atkins Jr officially purchased 80 acres of raw prairie along Hickory Creek from the federal government in the summer of 1842, where he likely set up a homestead for himself and his young family.  

 

   Living in what at the time was loosely referred to as the Hickory Creek Settlement, Julia’s upbringing contained a level of ruggedness totally unfamiliar to us in the 21^st century. Before her teenage years were out, Julia had lost her mother Anna to the hardships of pioneer life, as well as three siblings, who found eternal rest in Denny Cemetery, or what is today known as Pioneer Memorial Cemetery. 

 

    As Julia Atkins came of age, she was known as a young woman of intense intellectual drive; she not only worked as a teacher, but also read from the New Testament in Greek. Frontier journalism would have played a role in her life, as her father and grandfather were subscribers to The Western Citizen, a fiercely anti-slavery newspaper published in Chicago. Thus with the written word, Julia Atkins sealed herself into Mokena’s history. 

 

    With the construction of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad between the former city and Joliet in 1852, Mokena was born. Spikes were freshly driven between the new rails, while a depot was constructed along a newly platted Front Street; and that November, 18 year-old Julia set pen to paper in the first, and as far as anyone living knows, only issue of the Mokena Star. Lacking a press, her flowery script covered two huge broadsheets which bore chatty items such as the fact that the few villagers could expect an evening train out of Joliet at 7:30, as well as that tradesmen of all kinds were “vying with each other to see which will become the first established in business” in the new community. At the time, Julia’s Mokena, a “flourishing village in the western country” contained two finished buildings, along with a third under construction, with more expected in the near future.  

 

     As much at the Star carried newsy items, it was also a kind of literary journal, carrying poetry and various op-ed pieces. Among others, the young journalist penned a cautionary anti-tobacco and liquor treatise titled “Habit” in which the horrors of addiction were laid out, as well as a philosophical piece called “The Mind”, in which she pondered its meaning, proudly stating that it “distinguishes man from the brute creation.”

A Portrait of Julia Atkins, seen here around 1870, after she had moved from Mokena.

 

    Less than two years after Julia Atkins’ journalistic accomplishment, she and her family moved away from Mokena and to Livingston County. Befitting of her scholarly standing, she eventually attended a girls’ college in Evanston that eventually would be integrated into what is today Northwestern University. After her marriage to Dr. John L. Miller in 1862, she moved east, and ultimately passed away at age 72 in 1906 in Massachusetts. 

 

    Nowadays, the one and only known copy of the Mokena Star resides in an archive in our public library, resting in a place from which our community marches forward. Her role as an interested and vested local observer has left us with an irreplaceable record of Mokena’s first days. As such, Julia Atkins and her efforts are worthy of our utmost praise and respect. 

Sons of the Soil: The Story of the Cleveland Family

   History has been kind to the earthly memory of our earliest settlers, those honored few who braved the fierce unknown of the American west, and were the first to break the virgin soil upon the prairie where Mokena would later stand. The families of John McGovney and Allen Denny are well remembered, as they rightfully should be, while the collective recollection of other early clans has all but evaporated from local memory. One of these, the Clevelands, weren’t exactly the first to make their home here, but they still were made of the brave and hearty stock that has earned them the honor to be called our pioneers. 

 

   As all stories have a beginning, ours opens with William Bryan Cleveland, who was born in the state of New York on October 21^st, 1820. Being composed of the rugged stuff that characterized our forefathers, he heard the call of the west as a young, unmarried man, and carved out a home for himself in the wilds of the yet-unnamed Frankfort Township in 1844. As was typical of the pioneer’s lot in this time frame, the early residents of our region lived in hardscrabble log cabins and tended to modest farms on the wide-open plains of eastern Will County. 

William Bryan Cleveland, circa 1860.

 

   In the same period, another Cleveland made his home in our midst, this time being Orrin Baker Cleveland, a fellow New Yorker who was three years the senior of William. When the dense fog of time is parted, the historic record seems to indicate that the men were cousins. Which one of them got here first is lost to the ages, although a shred of evidence exists that Orrin might have been here as early as 1839. 

 

   An 1850 census taker found the men living in the same household, and with the formation of Frankfort Township’s government that year, William Cleveland was elected as its first supervisor, indicative of his status as a well-respected resident of the area. In 1854, William  took as his wife Emily Haven, the daughter of prominent New Lenox settlers and a niece of our own Allen Denny. Pioneer life being one of toil and hardship, Emily passed away a little over a year later at the age of 23, joining their infant son Willie, who died the same year. 

 

   During these years, a rustic blacksmith’s shop could also be found on the Cleveland place, housed in a little building that was fashioned out of hand-hewn oak timbers. It would’ve likely been lost to the ages, if not for a tale told a 100 years later. The teller would say that he heard that none other than Abraham Lincoln’s horse had been shod there, while his master, not yet our president, lodged at the time-honored Old Brick Tavern on the Haven property further west on today’s Route 30. While an exciting story, it must be regarded as just that, a patriotic tall tale, as by this late date, there is no way to verify its truth. 

 

   By the time of the Civil War, William Cleveland’s farm contained a narrow but solidly sized stretch of land, the center of which would be located at today’s intersection of Wolf Road and Route 30. Reaching all the way north into the space that now contains the Old Castle Woods subdivision, and measuring south to the Joliet Cut-Off railroad, it was enough to provide an existence for this man of the soil. Orrin Cleveland’s property sat immediately to the west, and contained more or less the same acreage. The timeline is murky, but it would be remembered decades later that somewhere in this era, William supplemented his income by keeping a store in the young community of Frankfort. 

 

   During the trying days of the Rebellion, the Cleveland family contributed greatly to the North’s war efforts, when Orrin’s sons Frederick and Charles bore arms with Will County’s 100^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry and marched in the Union army for three years. Both young men were lucky to return home in one piece. In the euphoric days after the end of the Civil War in 1865, William Cleveland married a second time, this betrothal being on May 22^nd of that year to Stella M. Martin, a native of Vermont. While she was 26 years his junior, the two Clevelands welcomed six children into the world that modern research has been able to identify, namely Lillian, another Willie, Clarence Martin, Mabel, and Eva. A young daughter, Emily, didn’t live to adulthood. 

 

   William B. Cleveland was very involved in the community, and aside from his supervisor’s seat, he held the office of justice of the peace for eight years, and also served at least one term as the director of the small, one-room schoolhouse that sat in the middle of his property, having stood at our current intersection of Wolf Road and Route 30. Sometime before 1873, William’s farm grew by absorbing the property of his cousin Orrin, who for the time being, disappeared from the historic radar. In these days, in addition to farming his 125 acres, William Cleveland also made a living as a stock raiser. 

 

A slice of Americana, this lithograph shows the farm of William Bryan Cleveland as it appeared in 1873. With a viewpoint looking to the south, modern-day Route 30 is in the foreground of the image, with what is now Wolf Road leading into the background at left. At left can be seen the small Cleveland schoolhouse, with students playing in the road.  

   The long-established agriculturist breathed his last in the summer of 1883, and a little over a decade later, in early 1894, word trickled in that Orrin Cleveland died back in the family’s ancestral home of New York. In silent testimony to the fact that he considered Frankfort Township his home, the mortal remains were shipped back to our neck of the woods to be interred in the Cleveland plot in Frankfort’s Pleasant Hill Cemetery. 

 

   A new era dawned in the history of the family’s acreage outside Mokena in May 1908, when Clarence Cleveland, the 35-year-old son of William and Stella, bought the farm from his father’s estate. Lately a resident of Chicago, the young Cleveland now found himself the owner of a property which by this time had grown to include a large tract stretching north almost to Hickory Creek, hugging the east side of modern-day Wolf Road. Shortly after the transaction was complete, Clarence Cleveland returned to the farm of his birth with his wife Anna. An educated man, he received part of his learning in Joliet as well as at a business college in Chicago. With the passage of time, Clarence Cleveland became a prosperous and respected dairyman, and could afford to hire the Mokena firm of Julius Oswald to build one of the first concrete block silos in our neighborhood in fall 1912. By and by he set about improving the old place, and the following summer, also had a massive barn built, measuring in at 124 by 36 feet. Both the silo and the barn were local landmarks for decades. 

Seen here around 1999, the concrete block silo on the former Cleveland farm was long a familiar sight to Wolf Road travelers. Situated slightly west of the intersection of Route 30 and Wolf Road, the old silo was demolished shortly after this image was made.

 

   Clarence Cleveland was very involved in dairy affairs, and represented the Mokena local of the Milk Producer’s Association before the state legislature. He also held strong opinions, and would distinguish himself as an avid letter writer, not just to editor William Semmler of the News-Bulletin, but also to such prominent papers as the Chicago Tribune. His communiques covered a wide range of topics, all of which were matters important to his fellow dairymen.  

 

   Not only was he one of the most influential dairy farmers in early 20^th century Mokena, but he also had a particularly strong sense of boundaries. Over the years, more than one village child would be warned not to venture onto his property, as he was known to guard it by shotgun, with which he also stringently enforced hunting laws on his farm. This aspect of Cleveland’s reputation became so well known in Mokena, that a friend of his felt compelled to write to the News-Bulletin in February 1931 and come to the defense of his character. Jay Butler, who had resided on the farm with Clarence Cleveland for two years, put forth that anyone would be allowed to enjoy the immaculate woodland of the Cleveland estate, as long as they first kindly asked permission to venture therein. 

 

   Before all else, Clarence Cleveland was a man of nature. He created a wild flower preserve on his property, one that was described by a contemporary as “one of the outstanding beauty spots in the county.” His passionate love of the natural environment also led to one of the most colossal shakeups that Mokena has ever seen. When Wolf Road was due to be concreted for the first time in the 1920s, plans called for the new road to deviate slightly from its original route and be built through a large tract of forest on the farm. From 1929 to 1934, Clarence Cleveland waged a bitter, four-year war against the county, in which he personally attempted to halt the construction of the road through his land. From his battle station, he gave as his motive the protection of his priceless, pristine timberland, which would be decimated by road construction, specifically having cited “the destruction of several hundred of (his) most beautiful forest trees, flowering bushes and vines.” Cleveland also readily stated that more than a few of the trees were over a century old. In his corner for the fight, were groups as prestigious as the Illinois chapter of the Wild Flower Preservation Society and the Illinois Conversation Council. In the end, a suit was brought against him by county bigwigs, and compromise was finally reached in April 1935. The road was finished, and a minimum of trees were hurt.

 

   Clarence Cleveland died on the old homestead in what would have been his 74^th year on April 30^th, 1947, after a long illness. His passing was observed with great attention in Mokena, with the News-Bulletin shouting the headline from the front page of its May 2^nd issue. Before long, the property was no longer in the family. The old Cleveland farm house, which saw over a century of history pass by its door on the southwest corner of today’s Wolf Road and Route 30, is long gone, as well as is any other trace of the Clevelands’ existence on their property. A little way north of the intersection is a quiet street that now bears the family’s name, having been laid out long after their existence here. Venturing down this road, one is surrounded by serene woodland. When the moment is just right, one can feel the spirit of Clarence Cleveland and his love for the land that was his own. 

 

Thy Great Commercial Tree: The Story of James Ducker

   Commerce drives a community, and businesses such as Berkots and Mokena Video immediately bring our village to mind. Known for miles around, they are not only fixtures in our landscape, but they also have the earthy credence of long-established houses that have been a part of Mokena for decades. Long before their and our time, came James Ducker, who was not only one of the first merchants to speak of in town, but whose name is intertwined with the heady, early days of Mokena. 

     Ducker first saw the light of day on October 27^th, 1823 in a small town called Epworth, not far off England’s east coast. The Duckers were a farming family, and members of the peace-loving Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. As a mere lad of 15, James Ducker ventured to the medieval city of Hull, a place around 25 miles northeast of his home. While there, the young man worked in a store for about 5 years, where he learned the ins and outs of the business. As England’s dreary weather came to plague Ducker’s health, so it was that in 1852, at the age of 29, that he set sail for America. 

 

    After whiling for a bit in Chicago, James Ducker headed south to sparsely settled Frankfort Township, where he took up farming. He tried his hand at cultivation for a year, until a disastrous hailstorm ruined his crops. This experience soured Ducker, and in the words of a later historian, “convinced him that agriculture was not his forte in life.” Out of this pitfall, fate led him to relocate to Mokena in 1853, where his name would be sealed to the ages. 

 

    The town as it was when James Ducker moved here was barely worthy of the name, being more so a tiny hamlet clustered around the new Rock Island tracks, which had just been constructed the year before. He was an Englishman surrounded almost entirely by Germans, the community being mostly populated by the latter. The community needed goods, and where there was a want, Ducker found an opportunity, and opened a store upon his arrival. A 19^th Mokenian shopping at Ducker’s would find all sorts of general goods for sale, while almost 100 years later, one Mokena old-timer specifically remembered Ducker selling “boots and kerosene.” An 1870 ad from his store, having appeared in the Joliet Republican, specifically mentioned wares such as "Dry Goods, Groceries, Hats and Caps, Boots and Shoes, and Yankee Notions" while another from a year later listed off “Dress Goods, Flannels, Blankets, and Scarves”. In his Mokena heyday, Ducker had also come to be known across the region as a grain dealer.  

James Ducker, one of Mokena's pioneer merchants, as seen in this circa 1880 image. 

 

     The exact location of James Ducker’s general store remains vague. In the generations after his time, memories became foggy, and conflicting explanations came to light. A 1937 retrospective article in Mokena’s News-Bulletin placed it in a long-gone building close to the southeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets. This jives with the fact that Ducker came to own a sizeable chunk of real estate along the south side of Front Street, running from Mokena Street and stretching east almost half the distance to Division Street. 

 

    As a newly minted storekeeper, Ducker wed Scottish-born Jeanette Allison in 1854, and came to raise a large family with her, at least five of their children surviving into adulthood. By 1862, the Duckers had built a stately home at today’s 11122 Third Street to house their young family. Looking much as it did in the 19^th century, the house was declared a Will County Historic Landmark in 2011. 

 

    After having found commercial success in Mokena, James Ducker moved to Joliet in 1874, re-establishing his store where it would become a fixture for generations. While in business there, Marshall Field & Co. reached out to him as a possible foreign buyer for their firm, but he declined, preferring to stay in Will County. Ducker breathed his last on December 16^th, 1885, in the county seat. His mortal remains were buried in scenic Oakwood Cemetery, where a distinguished monument still stands over his bones. 

 

    Decades after his death, a local history book remembered him as “one of the county’s most influential residents” and one who “long held a prominent place among businessmen of northeastern Illinois.” Before he became wealthy in Joliet, and years before his name was theirs, James Ducker was a Mokena mainstay.  

Beyond the Milky Way: Mokena's History with the Bowman Dairy Company (Part 2)

   If you haven’t already, be sure to read Part 1 of this entry! (The first piece below this one on the page)

 

   In the aftermath of the 1909 tumult, the Milk Producers’ Association grew in influence, and came to boast of an active Mokena local, headed by dairyman and auctioneer Herbert Moriarty. Through the Association’s efforts, patrons of the Bowman plant were receiving $2 per 100 pounds of milk they sold to the company by January 1911. Five years came and passed, and as 1916 rolled around, World War I tightened its grip on Europe, and the Battles of Jutland, the Somme and Verdun dominated the headlines. Meanwhile in Mokena, another battle was brewing, one that dwarfed the troubles of 1909. Eventually dubbed the Milk War by the Joliet press, it luckily didn’t claim any lives, but it wasn’t for a lack of brutality. So it was, that another grim chapter in Bowman’s relationship with its Mokena suppliers began. 

 

Local auctioneer and dairy farmer Herbert Moriarty was the head of the Mokena local of the Milk Producer's Association.

 

   The trouble first started towards the end of March 1916, when the Association suggested to area dairymen to sell their milk for no less than 4 cents a quart, half the cost of retail in Chicago. Initially, Bowman would have none of it, sticking earnestly to its guns with its old price. Mokena producers were incensed, and the March 25^th issue of the Joliet Herald-News shouted that they were “on war paths.” The 187 area farmers who were in a position to sell their product to the Bowman plant set forth an ultimatum to the Chicago-based giant, urging that the new price be met by April 1^st, or they’d cut off their supply. 

 

    As the days dragged on, things looked dire for Bowman, when on March 30^th, all local members of the Association convened at the Mokena Hall on Front Street. A vote was taken, and with one fell swoop, the dairymen stood with other milk producers in Wisconsin and Indiana, and cut off Bowman. 

 

    The dairymen took steps to prevent any milk whatsoever from reaching Chicago. The Herald-Newsdescribed “Mokena seething with farmers”; some had formed a cordon around Bowman’s plant on Marti Lane, while others gathered at the Rock Island depot and shooed away shippers. Roads leading into town were under guard by bands of strikers, some of whom were said to be armed with “hoe handles and stale eggs.” At a time when the US military was pursing raider Pancho Villa south of the nation’s border, media accounts of the local boycott were rife with militant imagery. A newspaper report said the stretch of the Rock Island between Mokena and Chicago “resembled the Mexican border without the firearms.” 

 

    Bowman employee George Osmus was sent to pick up milk from some hold-out suppliers, and while en route to his destination outside town, he came across six farmers guarding a crossroad. Where exactly this happened in Mokena has been lost to time, but when the gang tried to force Osmus’s team of horses to turn back, their heavy handedness backfired. Village constable Fred Mau came to Osmus’s rescue and leveled a revolver at the dairymen, one of whom sensibly talked Mau into putting his gun away. Once the piece was holstered, Mau then brandished a “big hickory stick” and attacked the strikers. Serious injuries abounded after the melee; Byron Nelson came out with head wounds, Daniel Kohl had a fractured arm, and Fred Hentsch was knocked almost unto unconsciousness. 

 

    Tensions were hair-trigger after the brawl. The same day, Fred Brown of New Lenox tried to cross a picket, and was met by outraged farmers who threw his full milk cans into a roadside ditch. They were only later able to be recovered and brought to the Bowman plant under guard. Despite the fact that another warlike meeting took place at Mokena Hall, things were a little more under control on April 2^nd. The tense calm in Mokena was largely due to the fact that sheriff’s deputies from Joliet had by then arrived in town to allow milk to pass through the blockade. Town marshal Conrad Schenkel helped, whose presence drew “hoots” from onlookers. 

 

    Bowman’s reinforcements helped bring a trickle of product to the Mokena facility, infusing the company with a sense of confidence. Meanwhile, farmers around the village that still refused to cooperate fed milk to their pigs rather than sell at the old price. Within a few days, the Herald-News grimly predicted that Chicago was “near a milk famine” due to the situation in our neck of the woods. Miraculously, on April 3^rd, the blockaders stood down, and by the 7^th, news broke that the city dealers had finally caved, and agreed to buy milk from Mokena dairymen for nine cents a quart, a price that the Herald-News snidely commented would be passed on to the consumer. 

 

    As if 1916 wasn’t already bad enough for Bowman, it was about to get a lot worse. Barely three hours after Mokena’s dairymen signed the peace terms, the engineer of an eastbound freight train passing through town in the dead of night spotted flames shooting out of the plant. He slowed his locomotive until it ground to a halt, and laid on his whistle to alert the small village of the emergency, one account even has the intrepid man, whose name was never noted for posterity, dismounting his locomotive and running door to door to awake residents.  Conrad Schenkel, the aforementioned village marshal, was also commander of the Mokena fire brigade, and assumed charge of those who turned out and fought the flames for the next three hours. The only firefighting equipment the village had to boast of in this time was a hand-drawn hose cart, which incidentally, is still the property of the village to this day. Railroad cars on the switch tracks at the plant proved on early obstacle to putting out the fire, but easier access was gained once two switch engines shunted them away. 

   It would later be ascertained that the flames got their start in the boiler room. No one was ever able to get to the bottom of what caused the fire. Despite the best efforts of the 50 or so men who put out the blaze, machinery in the building’s boiler room, engine room and ice plant was totally destroyed, and over half of the mostly wooden plant was gutted. The company assessed its total damage at around $10,000, with all operations at the Mokena facility being totally shut down for ten days.  Meanwhile, on April 16^th, 1916, theHerald-News stated that “a large force of carpenters, machinists and electricians have been working day and night to get the plant in running order.”

   One can’t help but take notice of the timing of this conflagration. To say that it was suspicious, coming on the same night the Milk War ended, would be putting it mildly. Could this have been arson? The smoke still hadn’t cleared. Barely a month after the first fire, another blaze broke out on May 8^th, 1916, when a heap of tar-soaked cork used in the ice plant spontaneously combusted. While the windows in the engine room shattered due to the heat, the employees of the plant were able to put out the flames with a fire house on hand. 

 

Bowman Dairy's milk bottling plant as it appeared after the large 1916 addition, as seen looking west from the intersection of today's Wolf Road and McGovney Street.

 

   Business marched on, and years came and passed. However, beneath a veneer of prosperity in the post-World War I era, discontent was brewing. In the 1920s, a prickly issue reared its head amongst the local dairy farmers, namely that of having their herds tested for tuberculosis. This was a simmering problem that was long in the making, and had been grumbled about as early as 1908. A prime example is the state law that came into effect on New Year’s Day 1909, which directed that dairymen “have their cow barns whitewashed and kept as clean as possible, also that concrete floors be laid in these cow barns, and that each milker be attired in a white apron and that such milkers wash their hands after each milking.” What to our modern ears sounds like common sense, was a somewhat new-fangled idea to the farmer of yore. These directives, combined with the fact that inspection of cattle by government officials was thought to be near, didn’t sit well with a fair number of the agriculturists in Mokena. The opposition lay chiefly in the fact that no small expense was involved in bringing their farms up to snuff, and out of a fear that government meddling in their herds would result in their cows being condemned. 

 

   Health and sanitization were always number one with the Bowman company, and the whole process of accepting milk from the outside farms of the producers was no trifling matter. A typical example of their earnestness about the subject was when the company cut off the supply from local farmer August Hentsch in early 1912 due to typhoid in his family, much to his vexation. When hoof and mouth disease appeared in our neck of the woods at the end of 1914, a shallow ditch was dug in the Mokena plant’s driveway, which was then filled with a liquid disinfectant. Every team of horses hauling milk into the plant had to step through this chemical stew, of which the dairymen were not fans, piping up that the mixture was so strong that it was eating away at their horses’ hooves. 

 

   The issue with the cattle testing never really went away. The Chicago Board of Health began especially strongly campaigning for the tuberculin test in the 1920s, and a measure was even passed that forbade the selling of milk in the city that came from untested cattle. This spelled big trouble for our dairymen, who continued to strongly argue against the testing. A positive result in their herds would effectively put them out of business. In this case, neither state nor federal government would come to their rescue in any meaningful way. So unpopular was the testing measure that in March 1926, of the 162 farmers in and around Mokena who supplied milk to Bowman, only 18 of them had tested their herds. The movement had picked up a huge amount of steam, and a hard deadline of April 1^st was given to the dairymen to have the cattle testing done, after which point if the numbers had not significantly climbed, the Mokena plant would be shuttered. 

 

   So it was, that the first of the month came, and no great sudden change of sentiment had occurred, no last-minute wonder to save the plant once and for all. The doors were padlocked, and this time for good. The local men who worked there were given jobs at a Chicago facility of Bowman’s, and became commuters overnight. The closing was a staggering blow to Mokena, and the significant amount of trade from surrounding farms that came to town via the bottling plant was now lost. The News-Bulletin, our village’s home newspaper, shouted from its masthead the closing in its April 2^nd, 1926 issue, and starkly rued that “this effects every business in town and will mean less money spent locally”, going on that “in short, the dairy business in this section has been nearly ruined and it is probable that the dairy industry will never again be as flourishing as it has been.”  The many dairy farmers possessed of untested herds now faced a decision, either to change businesses, or feed their milk to pigs. A sliver of hope was held out that enough of the dairymen would come around and decide to test their cows, therefore allowing the Mokena plant to reopen in the summer or fall, but this never came to pass.

 

Mokena Mills, a Wolf Road mixed residential and commercial development, now stands on the site of the old Bowman Dairy plant.

 

   Thus the bottling plant on today’s Wolf Road was permanently shut down and mothballed for the next seven years. Mitchel Brewery occupied the premises from 1933 to 1940, and beginning in 1941, the Mokena Wallpaper Mill set up shop here. In 1988 Mokena Mills took over, another wallpaper concern, which kept up operations until June 1998. The rambling building was an old landmark, one that announced to Wolf Road travelers that they had arrived in our village. It was altered and added onto so many times in its long history, that looking at the massive, old place in its later years was like reading a beloved old book, with each new roofline and wing representing a new chapter in its history. It met the wrecking ball in the spring of 2004, and was forever erased from our landscape. What was once an important industry in Mokena, is also permanently gone. Not only is the Bowman plant with its glass bottles and big metal milk cans nowhere to be found, the 21^stcentury Mokenian would also be hard-pressed to find a single dairy cow in our neighborhood.