Halls of Decision: Mokena's First Village Hall

    In the heart of Mokena there stands a small, nondescript building. Simple in its construction, it’s not likely to ever win any architectural praise. With its weathered red bricks, and stone inscription standing sentinel over the front entrance, the structure has a place in our village’s history that’s nigh impossible to overstate. Nowadays bearing the address 10940 Front Street, and home to Mokena’s Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, in years past it housed our first village hall. For well over a century, mayors, trustees, and simple townspeople have passed through its portal.

     To fully understand the beginning of this place, one should first step back to 1880. In the spring of that year, rural Mokena officially incorporated as a village, leaving behind a failed try from a few years previous. After preliminary odds and ends like the licensing of saloons and laying drainage tile along the streets were carried out, the village solons saw through the purchase of a newly vacated lot on Front Street, one door east of Division Street. The deal was made official on May 8^th, 1884, and over time, this patch of property hosted all the trappings of a municipality, such as a tiny wooden jailhouse, an enclosure that held the fire brigade’s hoses and cart, and starting in 1898, Mokena’s first water tower. 

 

    Even after several decades of improvements in town, the community still lacked a proper village hall. First mayor Ozias McGovney and his board of trustees convened in a harness shop on Front Street, while future meetings were held in places as varied as the dank basement of Charles Schiek’s saloon or the waiting room of the Rock Island railroad depot. By 1916, mayor George Hacker and trustees Charles Liess, Emil Krapp, John Groth, Albert Braun, John Nielsen, and Edward Schenkel were coming together at the Mokena Hall, a rambling multi-purpose building that stood at the current site of Avalanche Jewelry.

 

    At this time, the village hosted around 400 residents, and town leaders were in the market for a permanent home. When Mayor Hacker and his trustees assembled on February 2^nd, 1916, the subject came up of building a permanent structure to house a council chamber, a sturdier jail than the one already in existence, and a better space for the firefighting accoutrements. After word got out among Mokenians that the board was looking to build, there was concern by some that taxes would go up, but this notion was quashed by village clerk Bill Semmler, who was also the local correspondent to the Joliet Herald-News.

     

    To get the ball rolling, the village had to raise a bond of $4,600 to build the new town hall and simultaneously carry out a water main extension to some homes in town. The question went to referendum on April 18^th, 1916, when the construction question passed 109 to 21 votes. The poll was unique, in that Mokena women were able to cast their votes, having been granted limited suffrage three years previously by the state government. 

 

    Mayor Hacker, a contractor by trade, donned the hat of his day job and drew up some plans for the town hall, one that the Herald-News announced with restrained excitement would be “equipped with electric lights”. The village board accepted bids for construction of the new building, but all were rejected in June as being too expensive. At the end of July, concrete mason and Front Street resident Julius G. Oswald started work on the structure’s foundation, but before proper construction could begin, a slight problem had to be taken care of, namely the removal of the old jail which still stood on the village property.  The wooden shack was unloaded to local farmer Dick McGovney for $20, who then put rollers under it, and had it dragged south by horsepower. He placed it on the south side of LaPorte Road, where it became his rustic home. 

 

    The summer led to another hitch, when the high temperature caused several cases of heatstroke in town that August, leading labor on the town hall to be temporarily suspended. Work under Contractor Oswald and his crew continued into the fall of 1916, with three jail cells being shipped from Detroit at the end of October. They were a snug five feet wide, and six feet, six inches high. The first village board meeting was to be held in the new council chamber in November 1916, but despite rushing by Julius Oswald and his crew, it was delayed until the very end of the year. Hiccups continued until the last second; when the building’s electric juice was first switched on, a light in the firehose’s cart room blew out, and a 100-watt nitrogen bulb in the council chamber was a dud. 

Used today by the Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, this quaint building housed Mokena's village hall and jail along with storing firefighting equipment when it opened in 1916. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

     The historic record is foggy, but the last village board meeting of 1916, held on December 27^th, was probably the first to be held in the new town hall. Mayor Hacker and every trustee were present, with rather mundane business being transacted, namely insuring the building and paying off those who had constructed it. After decades of use at this site, the village hall relocated to Carpenter Street in 1976, and ESDA moved into to the historic Front Street building in 1993, where it still resides. The small, unpretentious edifice has been witness to a multitude of Mokena’s history over the last 100 years, and in the hands of a caring community, it may behold another century of usefulness.

The Foe of Fire: Mokena's First Water Tower

   As Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, our forefathers used it to heat their homes and power the locomotives that breathed life to our town. We drew its glowing warmth and power from harvested coal, but as miraculous as its glimmer was, the flames were also the scourge of our ancestors’ lives. Be they embers from engine funnels, fires resulting from lightning strikes, accidental blazes due to defective flues, or even arson, fire was a constant threat. The narrative of Mokena’s long history is dotted with bad fires, including the great conflagrations of 1865 and 1892, in which huge swaths of properties were decimated, but luckily no lives were lost. Our townsmen of years past did everything they could to prevent fires before they started, and at the end of the 19^th century, during the days of the oft-forgotten Spanish-American War, something came along that would revolutionize this challenge: A 100-foot tall steel water tower, which not only gave the Mokenians of yore a much-needed boost in fire protection, but also later brought the modern opulence of indoor running water. A landmark in the truest since of the word, the tower stood triumphant over the rooftops of the village, and when seen from a distance, signaled that you were back home.  

Mokena's original water tower circa 1976, as seen looking east from Division Street.

 

   Upon Mokena’s incorporation in 1880, not only was it a time of dirt roads and wooden sidewalks, but also an era of little in the way of consolidated fire protection. Water mains and fire hydrants were still but a dream. In 1883, three years after incorporation, one of our founding fathers’ first acts was to call a fire brigade to life.  It would be easier said than done. On March 14^th of that year, it was decreed that a meeting be called to form the fire company, and by that spring it was in existence, but the village clerk wasn’t particularly wordy about its doings or who the company was made up of.

 

   For some long-forgotten reason, this first group disbanded, and the mayor and village trustees were back to re-organizing a new fire company in the spring of 1885. Come what was supposed to be its inaugural meeting on August 21^st, and no one showed up. Things were more robust three years later, when the existence of a sixteen-man unit was logged, resplendent in new uniforms and under the leadership of Front Street hardware merchant and fire marshal John Schuberth. Not a bad outfit for a village of only a few hundred residents. 

 

   In 1889, the firemen were augmented when the village board ordered the construction of two wooden water tanks, each holding about 60 barrels’ worth. They went up on Front Street for the express purpose of fire protection, one standing in the main business area between Lewis Zumstein’s store and Ferdinand Schiek’s saloon, and the other further east in front of John Collins’ house. 

 

   Any reader to this page will be familiar with the state of Mokena in the 1890s, a period that was, to put it mildly, not exactly our village’s most prosperous time. The nationwide Panic of 1893, the worst financial crisis in our country’s history prior to the Great Depression, hit the village hard, as did the completion of the Wabash Railroad to our town’s west and north which had slowly began to draw away trade over the last decade. The dearth of good roads in the neighborhood didn’t help, and more than a few Mokenians began to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Our village needed something to shake off the malaise, and just that was found in the greatest municipal project up to that time, that of the construction of our first water tower. 

 

   Thus the first steps were made in the direction of not only a real water tower, but also watermains along Front Street for the all-important reason of fire protection. It was the end of autumn 1896, and the village board was under the leadership of cattleman-turned-mayor Christian Bechstein, who began to quietly investigate and make inquiries in other towns were “water works” were already in existence, to use the parlance of the day. The matter stayed low-key for a while, until the August 1897 meeting of the board, when the chairman of the Committee on Fire and Water, lifelong Mokena resident Jacob Zahn, reported that the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works had turned in an estimate for a 75-foot tower of steel with a 2,000-gallon barrel for a total of $3,000, or roughly $100,000 in today’s money. The board moved to fish around for other bids with an important facet of any potential new tower being that it had frost casing. At the meeting in September, held at the hall of local grain merchant John A. Hatch, a representative from the Aermotor Company even came and made a presentation to Mayor Bechstein and the trustees, who politely thanked the gentleman for his time, but remained noncommittal. 

 

   On March 2^nd, 1898, they showed they were serious about the endeavor by earmarking the first money for the water tower. A few weeks later, Mokenians J.W. Ducker and Sam Fulton, members of the Committee on Fire and Water, hired one George C. Morgan, “a civil engineer of the City of Chicago” for the sum of $50 to draw up “plans, specifications and contracts” for the whole project. On April 15^th, the village dads studied the paperwork, and on this date motioned to “erect and maintain the waterworks” thereof, using the $4,000 they had set aside. As summer bloomed and the Spanish-American War raged, the time came for Mayor Bechstein and his board of trustees to examine the bids that had come in. After mulling over eight proposals from firms in such places as Aurora, Batavia, and West Pullman, the board chose that of the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company, who said they could build a four-column steel tower and tank for $3,180, not far off from their first estimate nearly a year earlier. 

 

   While Mokena’s treasury had more than a few dollars to its name at this point, the expense of building the water tower was more than anything it had seen up to this time. So it was that on September 7^th, 1898, an ordinance was drawn up to borrow money from some deep-pocketed local citizens to build it. The next month, $1,000 in bonds were sold to Nicholas Marti, a retired, Swiss-born farmer of some means, while another $1,000 came in by way of Heinrich Schmuhl, another local elderly gentleman with vast resources. 

 

   The powers that be had the pick of the litter for building sites in town, but ultimately chose the municipally owned lot smack in the middle of the village on Front Street, that was already home to the calaboose and an outbuilding holding Mokena’s steam-powered fire engine. Meanwhile, construction had begun in earnest, and in early September, our town correspondent to the Joliet Weekly News reported that the water works were almost done. Prone to hyperbole, this logger of events, whose identity has long since been lost to time, beamed that the tower could be seen from Joliet. 

An 1898 view of the construction of the water tower, with Front Street in the foreground. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

   Three years previous to the start of construction, village clerk and Mokena insurance man John Liess made a contribution that was vital to the project. Power would be needed to pump water out of the village well up into the new tower, and thus wind would be harnessed to do the job. A windmill was built, and while it slightly predated the completion of the waterworks and was not quite as tall, it was still nothing to sneeze at – measuring in at fifty feet tall with a twelve-foot wheel. Before it was built, Village Clerk Liess made a deal with the rest of the board, and donated a chunk of land fourteen feet by fourteen feet square on which to put it up, it being located in Lot Five in Block One of McGovney’s Addition to Mokena, or to put it in plainer words, today’s 10908 Front Street. After having giving several years of reliable service, the windmill was sold to farmer Anton Kohl for $20 in the summer of 1903. Pumping power at that point than came from a new three-horsepower gasoline engine.

 

   As October 1898 came to a close, our Joliet Weekly News correspondent proudly wrote that the brand-new water tower was finally finished. All told, it held a total of 60,000 gallons. However, maintenance of the new waterworks came with some headaches. Come Christmastime, Mayor Bechstein and the village board were furrowing their collective brow over the fact that the level of water in the tower had somehow dropped fourteen inches in three days from “leakages somewhere.” A concerned letter was hurriedly dashed off to Chicago Bridge and Iron. The stress continued into the early months of 1899, when water was freezing in the tank. A contraption was built to keep it continuously flowing in and out of the well and into the big tank, so as to prevent its solidifying. 

 

Mokena's water tower, as seen around 1910.

 

   The water tower stood in the middle of town for the next 86 years, and not only did it provide glistening water for fighting fires, but it was also tapped into to supply the wondrous luxury of indoor, running water to eleven village homes, mostly on Front Street, for the first time in 1900. The new, state of the art water tower in use today was completed on Bonness Avenue in 1980, ironically by Chicago Bridge and Iron, the same outfit that built the original tower over eight decades before. The old one, one of Mokena’s truest landmarks, simply wasn’t needed anymore. It was decided to do away with the old mainstay, and in the autumn of 1984, a one-man wrecking crew began slicing away the waterworks from top to bottom, and piece by piece, it disappeared from the village. The twisted heap of steel symbolized the end of an era. Some might even say that it marked the end of small-town Mokena. Although it is now gone, it is remembered by more than a few as the face of the community. 

 

 

The fate of the 1898 water tower, and its one-man wrecking crew.

One Man for the Union: The Life of Pvt. Carl Hacker

   In the annals of our country’s history, the most high-profile moments happened in locales far from Mokena. The watershed moment in America’s story, the Civil War, is one of these events that most of us consign to distant places, be they Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Vicksburg, Mississippi; or even Chancellorsville, Virginia. While the front lines in the struggle would’ve been a hard, days’ long trip from Will County, our community was just as affected by the conflict as all others were across the United States as they existed in those days, now a century and a half past. All one must do is visit Mokena’s cemeteries to find the time-honored graves of dozens of Abraham Lincoln’s soldiers. At least 45 Mokena men, some mere teenagers, took to the musket to preserve the Union. This is story of Carl Hacker, and a private soldier’s life after the guns fell silent.  

   To understand Hacker’s life, we have to first examine its beginning. Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Hacker was born February 23, 1846, at a place called Rosenhagen, a postage stamp-sized, wind-swept village on the Baltic Sea in what is today northern Germany. The son of Heinrich Hacker and Hanna Kitzerow, the boy’s homeland would be torn asunder with tumult and revolution from the time he was an infant, and like so many of his countrymen in search of a better, more stable life, Carl Hacker left the German plain and made his way to America as an adolescent. Barely 17 years old, in October 1863 he and his brother Christian, who had a year on him, left the port of Hamburg aboard the John Bertram, a wooden ship guided by huge sails. After a rough, weeks-long trip over the choppy waves of the Atlantic, the Hacker brothers first touched American soil and promptly made their way to eastern Will County.

 

   Carl Hacker’s new home was thickly populated with his Teutonic brethren, and years later, in the early 20^thcentury, Will County historian W.W. Stevens would matter-of-factly write that our neighborhood “…is indebted to Germany for many of her best citizens.” Through the thick fog of the ages, it appears that Carl Hacker’s first station here was the New Lenox Township farm of his aunt and uncle, Maria and Heinrich Schmuhl, who at this point were already well established at their property along today’s Route 30. Originally a resident of the hamlet of Mokena, Heinrich Schmuhl worked as a laborer on the new Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad as it was built through our neck of the woods eleven years earlier. 

 

   At the time Carl Hacker first set foot in our environs, America was already two years deep into our nightmarish Civil War. At this late date, we can only image what his reaction was to landing in a new country deep in the mire of war, and what feelings it awoke in him. On October 4^th, 1864, the fresh-faced 18-year-old joined Company F of the 64^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry in Joliet. Upon mustering in, he was measured at five feet six and a half inches tall, with brown hair, hazel eyes and a light complexion. It should be noted that young Hacker volunteered to join the Union army, which begs the question, as to what inspired this newly arrived immigrant, who by his own later testimony did not yet speak a lick of English, to risk life and limb for his newly adopted country so soon after his arrival.

 

   The 64^th Illinois had already been under President Lincoln’s wing for almost 3 years before Private Hacker came onto the scene, having been raised at Springfield’s Camp Butler at the end of 1861. Picking up the moniker “Yates’ Sharpshooters” along the way, (after then-governor Richard Yates) the regiment had already been bloodied at various engagements in the western theater of the war, such as at the Battle of Atlanta in the summer of 1864. At some unknown date, while on duty at Newport, North Carolina, Private Hacker was temporarily transferred to the 15th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. As such, certain details of his time in the service of the Union are murky, as it is hard to pin down when he was with which regiment.

 

   Not too long after New Year 1865, something happened that would follow young Carl Hacker for the rest of his life. Memories as to exactly when this mishap occurred were greatly clouded in the years thereafter. Was it on January 20^th? Or around February 15^th? Maybe as late as March 20^th? No one privy to it could agree. In any case, it was in the lead-up to the war’s end. While at camp in Louisville, Kentucky, Private Hacker was with his company on drill, and while passing through a ravine at the double quick, the young man tripped and fell upon a small stump, absorbing the hard blow in his left side. Using the terminology of the day, it was clear that the fall caused a rupture in his torso. 

 

   Not too long afterward, the rupture was further aggravated while he was unloading barrels of sugar, and marching through the Carolinas only made it worse, and at one point, the German-born private could barely walk. Further compounding this, was the fact that Carl Hacker was taken prisoner on March 8^th, 1865, at the Battle of Wyse Forks, near Kinston, North Carolina, an oft-forgotten engagement in the annals of the Civil War. He was held for about eighteen days in the Confederate capitol of Richmond, then in a stroke of luck, exchanged for rebel prisoners and released, thus miraculously avoiding the untold horrors of the infamous holding pen at Andersonville, Georgia. Upon his return to Union arms, he completed a roundabout tour of Indianapolis and St. Louis, before mustering out of the army on July 13^th, 1865, at Springfield. Carl Hacker was ultimately in the service for less than a year, but in those ten months, he saw and did his share, and earned the laurels to rightly call himself a veteran of the Civil War. 

 

   In the hot summer of 1865, he went back home to New Lenox Township to his aunt and uncle Maria and Heinrich Schmuhl’s farm, where upon his return, his aunt would later remember that he was filthy and infested with body lice. The Schmuhls got rid of his dirty uniform, while Maria bathed him (in the presence of her husband, she wanted it known) and treated his still-festering injury with home remedies. Years later, Maria Schmuhl would matter of factly go on record stating that she was doing her patriotic duty and “deemed it her (duty) as an aunt towards her nephew to assist him in the manner she did.”

 

   After the war, life went on for Carl Hacker, and he married Maria Mau in November 1867 at the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church in Mokena. It is with this tight knit congregation that the Hackers would be affiliated for the rest of their lives. Maria was also a new arrival to the United States, having arrived here not even four years previous. The pair came to have five children born between 1868 and 1880, namely (in the order of their birth) Louisa, Charles, George, Minnie and Philip. Blessings were abundant, as they all lived well into adulthood. All of the Hacker children were born in Mokena except Philip, the youngest, who made his appearance when the family lived for a two-year spell at Gallatin in northern Missouri. Of all of his siblings, George Hacker’s name is writ largest upon our village’s narrative, as he would not only become a successful lumber and real estate man in Mokena, but was also mayor from 1915 to 1929. 

 

   In the autumn of 1878, Carl Hacker bought a house on today’s McGovney Street from Joachim Möller, paying the handsome sum of $600 for the property. The old homestead would stay in the family for decades. As so many of our town folk have, Carl Hacker put food on the table courtesy of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, the lifeblood of Mokena. However, the injury he suffered in the war, while not sustained on the battlefield, was coming back to haunt him. As a result of the 1865 rupture, he suffered no small amount of hardship in his day-to-day life. By the end of the 1870s, while working as a laborer on the railroad tracks, section foreman and Front Street resident Patrick Brennan noticed that Hacker “would hold back from lifting” and when asked why, would blame his war injury. Eventually Brennan got him work cutting grass and pitching hay, as in the foreman’s words, “he could not do more at best.” In regards to the old trauma, Brennan had seen it, and would blunty say that “it is very bad.” Carl Hacker also worked as a switchman, and later became foreman of the railroad section himself, courtesy of Patrick Brennan’s help, who after some time thought it would be an easier job for the old soldier. All in all, Hacker put in 43 years for the Rock Island in Mokena. 

The home of Carl and Maria Hacker on today's McGovney Street. The old homestead was acquired by the Hackers in 1878, and stayed in their family for many years.

 

   As the years marched onward, the time had come for the former Private Hacker to seek financial help from Uncle Sam. Like most of his brothers in arms, Carl Hacker applied for a federal pension for his services to the Union in those hard, trying days of the 1860s. He submitted his first papers in the fall of 1878, thirteen years after the war ended. As was the case for most of the former fighters, it was a long, tangled, bureaucratic effort, one in which special pension attorneys were even involved. The veteran and Mokena resident spent years in a back and forth with Washington in an effort to get the highest possible compensation for his time in the army. The basis of his claim was the injury he suffered after the fall he took on drill on that day in 1865, which by then had required the more or less constant wearing of a truss.

 

   The complexities of getting the pension were compounded by the fact that there were no records of his having been treated by a regimental surgeon, who at the time of the fall, in Carl Hacker’s recollection, took a look at him, fitted him with a truss and more or less said “We’ll see what happens.” He didn’t press the issue at the time, because as he recalled years later, he considered the injury “under the circumstances it occurred (as) more of a disgrace than an honor.” Also complicating things were the fact that two buddies who were intimately familiar with Hacker and his injury were no longer alive by the time the pension process started, with one having died in the war and the other in Kansas after the conflict, or so he had been informed. His cousin, fellow St. John’s member Frank Kitzerow, who served side by side with him in the Civil War, couldn’t be of much help either, writing that he knew Hacker to be hale and hearty before the war, and that he was familiar with the rupture, but at the end of the day wasn’t sure exactly how his cousin had received it. All things considered, on November 8^th, 1890, Uncle Sam finally granted Hacker $8 a month, or about $250 in today’s money. 

 

   By the 1890s, the wearing of the truss had also come with its own issues, which in the words of Dr. Edmund Lynch, fellow Union veteran and Mokena medicine man, left Hacker’s skin “chaffed and reddened,” while another doctor wrote that the debilitating injury left him capable of “performing about one fourth of a(n) able bodied man’s labor.” In the eyes of the experts, he was suffering from a complete left inguinal hernia. 

 

   Carl Hacker hung up his railroad worker’s tools and retired around 1911. Before he called it quits after four decades of service, he received a hefty reward from the Rock Island for having kept the best section of the line. As of May 22, 1912 his pension had been generously raised and he was now taking in $15.50 per month for his services in the Civil War, or a little over $450 in current figures. He was a respected man in Mokena, as is evidenced by the three terms he was elected to serve on the village board from 1896 to 1902, and was also a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, the venerable, nationwide organization of northern veterans. 

The Hacker family lot in St. John's Cemetery.

 

   Carl Hacker breathed his last on October 24^th, 1916 at his home on McGovney Street, having reached the age of seventy years, surpassing the life expectancy for an American male in his day by two decades. His loved ones buried him in the family plot in St. John’s Cemetery on Wolf Road, where to this day his dark red gravestone holds watch. An American flag, placed on the earthen mound by caring hands, can always be found billowing over his dust. Carl Hacker’s name won’t be found in any grand histories of the Civil War, but he nevertheless played an important role in the siren call of his generation, and the biggest crisis our country ever faced. His memory is enthroned not only in the Valhalla of Union heroes, but in the pantheon of Mokena’s history. 

Nurturer of Life: The Story of Schiek Dairy

   As time marches on, everyday items that we take for granted slowly disappear and fade out of our lives. Phone booths, for example, which dotted the American landscape in years past, have all but disappeared, while typewriters have also been consigned to the dustbin of history. Milk delivery isn’t nearly as widespread as it once was, but in years past, the Schiek Dairy Company not only saw to this, but was also a true part of Mokena. Their roots were set down in our community, and to this day, the service they provided is fondly remembered by countless town residents.  

    The Schieks came from good Mokena stock. Their forebears settled in the yet-unnamed Frankfort Township in 1848, and counted themselves as one of our neighborhood’s first German-born residents. Not long after the Civil War, Phillip Schiek carved out space for a 27-acre farm along a country lane that we now call Wolf Road, and around 1870, he erected a sturdy farmhouse there that for more than 100 years would be identified with his descendants.  

 

    Philip’s son, Henry Schiek, was himself a farmer, and as best could be remembered, started casually selling milk to a handful of area residents from a horse drawn wagon around 1902. Refrigeration not being what it is now, he delivered every morning in big tin cans, and would come back the next day to fetch the empties. In 1906, his seven-year-old son Lester started working at his side, helping in the sleepy hours before school started in town. In his later years, Lester would recall “running like the devil” before he was due for class almost a mile away on the corner of Front Street and the now aptly named Schoolhouse Road. 

 

    Father and son Schiek never missed a day hauling milk, even during the snowbound winters when the few unpaved roads were unusable, sometimes requiring them to cut over fields with their horse team. As their business expanded, they began to buy milk from some neighbors to augment their own supply, and eventually an outbuilding on the Wolf Road farm was built to be used as a dairy house. Milk was brought here from the large barn that stood where today’s Peppermill Restaurant is, when it was then put into a big cooling vessel. From there, it went to another contraption that could fill four quart or pint bottles at a time, while also sealing them. 

A window into a bygone age: The farmhouse of the Henry Schiek family, seen here around 1910. Seen here left to right are Henry Schiek, Dewey the Dog, Lester Schiek, Alma Schiek, Mabel Schiek and Carrie Schiek. The historic farmhouse stood at today's 19200 Wolf Road. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

    In 1928, the business was passed completely to Lester Schiek, when his father Henry retired from the milk route. In the 1930s, Lester did a little modernizing by replacing the old wagon with a truck, with which he literally lightened the load of deliveries to town. In its heyday, Schiek Dairy counted around 300 to 400 local customers a week. Lester was not without competition however, as Marti Dairy operated across Wolf Road to the northwest from 1927 to 1945. Having stood appropriately at the current site of the Creamery, this concern was run by another Mokena farming family of long establishment, but was never able to match the Schieks’ client base.  

 

   By 1953, the Schieks ran three different routes and supplied 95% of the village with not only milk, but also butter, cottage cheese, and orangeade.  As it was since its birth, Schiek Dairy was a family enterprise. Lester’s wife, Julia, helped where she could, and their son Willis (known around town as Bill) came in too at 20 in 1950. Daughters Joyce and Jean had a hand in making deliveries, who were well known in Mokena as being expert equestrians. The company was the kind of small town business that had the same families as customers for years. There came a point where patrons could walk into one of the farm’s small outbuildings on their own, take what they needed, and simply leave a note saying what they had taken along with some money. 

The matriarch and patriarch of Mokena's milk trade: Julia and Lester Schiek, seen here at their home around 1980. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

 

    When the dairy finally made its last delivery in 1976, it owned two trucks and looked over a herd of twenty cows. Gas stations selling milk dotted the landscape, and the Schieks’ trade was no longer profitable. Lester Schiek, the amiable patriarch of his family and business, passed away peacefully on October 6^th, 1984 in his landmark farmhouse on Wolf Road as he watched a ball game. By the time the 20^th century was out, the old place was erased from the landscape, and gave way to Grease Lightning at today’s 19149 Wolf Road. 

 

Lester’s grandson, Ralph Wiley, recently reminisced about his grandfather and the honored place he has in Mokena’s history. “I’ve never been around a harder working man in my life,” Wiley remembered. “They don’t make ‘em like Lester anymore.” 

 

Where Mortar and Pestle Worked: The Story of the Hensel Building

   No small amount of time has been spent on these pages detailing the histories of our landmarks in Mokena, of the people and stories that make up our narrative. A few of the places can still be visited, locations where one is face to face with past in all its rich, wondrous glory. However, a significant number of the old mainstays are long gone, permanently erased from our landscape as if they were never there. They live on in the memories of those who knew them, memories that in many cases, belong to increasingly fewer people as time goes on. Just one of these places was the historic structure that stood at today’s 11112 Front Street, the current site of Curtain Call Theater. 

   This old place so fondly remembered by countless Mokenians was a stunning example of vernacular Italianate architecture, a style that was in vogue in eastern Will County in the late 1860s and into the 1870s. It stood at two stories, with ample space on the ground floor for a business, of which several of differing kinds were housed here over the years. This part of the old building boasted big glass windows, allowing those on the street to see the wares displayed in them, and in the days before electricity, to allow ample natural light inside. In the interwar era, gilt letters reading “Drug Store – R. Hensel” could be read on the glass, with tin signs on the front façade proclaiming “Ice Cold Coca Cola Sold Here.” The magnificent false front had two sets of four wooden cornices, or brackets, as were so commonly found in Italianate architecture. Not to be missed in the eaves of the false front was the brilliant motif of a rising sun, carved by hand into the wood by some artisan, whose name has been swept away by the tides of time. The place was a perfect slice of Americana and a piece of Main Street USA.

 

An idyllic view of Front Street, circa 1925. The historic structure at left stood at today's 11112 Front Street, and over the years housed both the Zumstein store and the Hensel pharmacy.

 

   There exists an ancient plat map of Mokena bearing the date 1862, which is the Rosetta stone for understanding our small village in the Civil War era. This piece of surveying work indicates that some sort of structure already stood at the site in question at this early date, only ten years after the town was first laid out. Whether a regular house or a commercial building, is lost to history after all these years. What is clear however, is that the old structure that is remembered by so many Mokenians as having stood here probably didn’t come until a little later, leaving the fate of the original building here a mystery.

 

   As the 19^th century marched on, this Front Street property became intimately tied to the Zumstein family. Patriarch Louis Zumstein first saw the light of day on July 12^th, 1849 in the small village of Mittelbrunn, in what is today the southwest of Germany. The young man found himself on America’s shore as a 20-year-old, and promptly made his home in Mokena. Zumstein settled in our fair town during an era when a good number of the adults in the village came from somewhere else, he being part of the large Bavarian diaspora who lived in our neck of the woods. In the summer of 1876, exactly a month after our country celebrated her centennial, Louis Zumstein married Sophia Hauck, the daughter of a Mokena wagonmaker at the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church. 

 

   Less than a year later, in January 1877, possibly awash in wedding money, Zumstein purchased this Front Street property from town doctor H.W. Alexander. Interestingly, within a few years of acquiring the Mokena property, Louis Zumstein also bought a country store at Alpine, a settlement that had sprouted up almost four miles north of our village in Orland Township. Later a small hamlet would come to life there, but until then, Zumstein took an appointment as the new country post office’s postmaster in 1883. It’s not clear at this late point what was happening at his Mokena property in the time he was busy in Alpine, but what is known, is that Zumstein opened a store in his Front Street building sometime in the second to last decade of the 19^th century. His obituary, published decades later, stated with authority that the Mokena shop opened in 1886, while another source stated with confidence that it must have been as early as 1880. 

 

Louis Zumstein, circa 1890.

   Mokena was kind to the Zumsteins and their business, with things humming along to such a degree that they were able to build a one-story addition to the west side of their Front Street store in 1902 that opened up a previously residential area to be converted into retail space. In this store, which was lit by carbide gas, a shopper would have found a little bit of everything for sale. A 1910 ad described “the choicest stock of fresh groceries in town”, as well as “a full line of dry goods and notions” not to mention “flour, feed and salt always on hand.” Louis Zumstein himself was a well-regarded citizen of Mokena, a contemporary having said “in business circles Mr. Zumstein was recognized as an outstanding character, a man of integrity and honor…in religion he was firm in his convictions, just and unassuming in his manner, and a faithful member of the St. John Evangelical Church.”

 

   The Zumstein children were just as well known in town as their parents were. There were seven of them who entered the world between 1876 and 1891, of which four survived to adulthood. Frieda was active in St. John’s Sunday school as well as the village’s Home Study Club, a precursor to today’s Women’s Club. She was a silky-voiced singer who performed at countless local funerals and events in her day. Other parts of the Zumstein family circle were daughters Bertha and Georgia, as well as son Arthur. During the First World War, Arthur Zumstein was one of our community’s doughboys, having served on the now-forgotten Russian front during the American foray in Siberia. Every manner of souvenirs and mementoes from his time in this far-off land were displayed in the windows of the store upon his triumphant return to Mokena. 

 

Frieda (left) and Bertha Zumstein (right) of Mokena, circa 1910.

 

   Louis Zumstein breathed his last on May 11^th, 1923, and after his passing, Frieda and Arthur, who had previously worked as clerks in the store, kept up the business, although it’s not clear for how long. A new leaf was overturned in 1925, with the arrival of the Hensel family of Chicago. Even though patriarch Richard Hensel was lately of the Windy City, and had built much of his career there, he was at heart a Mokena man. 

 

   Born in the summer of 1868, Richard Hensel’s first years were spent in Chicago, where his German-born father was a cigar manufacturer. The elder Hensel built a livelihood there, until his workshop was reduced to ash and rubble after the great fire of 1871. Thus, in the aftermath of this disaster, the lad’s boyhood was spent in Mokena, the home of his mother. He went to school in the stately house of education that stood on the northwest corner of Front Street and today’s Schoolhouse Road, and as a youth worked not only as a clerk in a village store, but also for a period in the Baumgartner creamery in Frankfort, whose brick eminence stood for over a century on Route 45. As he struck out on his own, Dick Hensel went back to Chicago to pursue his calling as a pharmacist. After learning the tricks of the trade, all paths led back to Mokena, his old home.   

                                                                    

   In March 1896, Hensel rented what was then known as the Blaeser property on the northeast corner of Front and Mokena Streets, spruced it up a touch, and moved his drug store there. For a spell the post office was also located here, and while running his shop in this spot, he took up the mantle of correspondent for the Joliet News, sending in our town’s current events to the paper in the county seat. 

 

  In 1892 Hensel married Emma Cappel, the daughter of a well-known Mokena family. Together they brought five children into the world, one of which, Carrie Louise, or known to her friends as Dolly, would serve as the village’s telephone operator for a period. Emma Hensel departed this life in the winter of 1908, shortly before her 40^th birthday, after which Dick took Anna Gunzburger as his wife.

 

   After spending no small amount of time in Mokena, the Hensels packed up home and hearth to Chicago yet again, where Dick kept a pharmacy for years at 48^th and Lake Streets in the city. This geographic hopscotch continued; for reasons long since swept away by time, Hensel left this venture and made his way back to our gates in the 1920s, this time for good. After conducting a drug store in the old Sutter place four doors to the west for two years, Dick Hensel moved into the historic Zumstein property in October 1925. His business had been booming, and soon enough, the old shop was bursting at the seams. Hensel fixed up the Zumstein building to quite a degree after acquiring it, and even added a new concrete porch in front of it.

 

   Dick Hensel sold a wide variety of medicine in his day, and even was known to make his own, including a cough remedy that had a strong licorice flavor, containing also what was likely to be a splash of whiskey. One Mokenian even told this author that “You haven’t lived until you tried it.” Aside from being a place where prescriptions were filled, gifts of a nearly countless variety could be had at Hensel’s pharmacy, such as shaving cups and brushes, photo albums, playing cards and toys. Village residents could count on the store for candy, cigars, and school supplies as well. Chicago newspapers were also in stock, as were a full line of magazines, which was something not found in town before the pharmacy started carrying them. One could also drop off film which was then sent to Kodak for developing.    

 

   A grim incident in the daily life of this location is remembered in the ghastly robbery that took place here on March 14^th, 1938. At around eight o’clock that evening, three strangers walked into the drug store brandishing a sawed-off shotgun and an automatic pistol, when of the would-be criminals announced “This is a stickup. Get in there!” Whereupon Dick Hensel was forced into the building’s adjoining living quarters. Anna Hensel heard the hubbub and upon coming to check it out, she was also whisked into the room. The Hensels were hogtied on the floor, and a nearby phone was ripped from its connection in the wall. Dick Hensel was brutally kicked a few times, with an account of the incident from later that week saying that “the holdups were very abusive and used profane and dirty language.”

   One of the men guarded the bound Hensels, while the other two tore apart the shop, taking $35 in cash and about $225 in merchandise, coming out to a loss in today’s money of a little over $5,000. At one point one of the hoodlums demanded jewelry from the pharmacist, and when offered his masonic ring, the robber cryptically replied “No, brother, we don’t want that.” The trio took their time in the store, spending nearly an hour pilfering and ransacking. During the course of their work, Mokenian Karl Kraus walked into the store, at which point he also found himself at gunpoint and bound with tape, just like his fellow townfolk. Before the bandits were done with him, they took $11 in cash off his person. 

    Eventually the criminals left, not before taking the key to the front door with them. Anna Hensel’s hands were tied in front of her, and after wiggling for about twenty minutes, was able to untie her husband, who in turn freed her and Karl Kraus, thus ending their harrowing experience. 

 

   In his decades of business at the old stand, Dick Hensel earned his place as an anchor of Front Street. Described as friendly and grandfatherly, he is nevertheless remembered by some Mokenians for his occasionally less-than-sunny disposition. In theory the pharmacy had a full-service soda fountain, but upon placing an order, more than one village youth was snippily told to go to Gus Braun’s shop down the street, as Hensel felt he had more pressing items to occupy himself with. Ironically, Gus could be just as grouchy. 

   Nevertheless, Hensel was entitled to the odd bad day as much as we all are. He gave Mokena years of service, manning a post as village trustee from 1929 to 1934, as well as that of school director and justice of the peace. Dick Hensel finally put away his mortar and pestle in the first days of January 1947, after having been hard at work in the pharmacist’s field for over 50 years, a substantial piece of which was spent in our community. Our erstwhile village newspaper, the News-Bulletin, carried the news of his retirement on the front page of its January 10^th edition, noting that “We are sorry to have the Hensels go out of business, but after the many years in which Mr. Hensel has conducted a drug store, we feel it is a fine thing that (he) can retire and take life easy.” The shop was sold to Earl Krisam of Chicago, who opened a general merchandise store. 

 

   Dick Hensel crossed the great beyond on June 19^th, 1951. Fifteen years after his passing, another pharmacist, Daniel Kurber acquired the historic old building and had it razed to build a new drug store, which opened in 1966. The time-honored building may have been gone, but the Kurbers thrived in this spot for decades, just as the Hensels did. 

 

   The Zumstein and Hensel families left their mark on a village that hasn’t forgotten them. Even though their physical walls are long gone, a lifetime of memories remain in their place. They earned their places in the pantheon of Front Street. 

Guarding the Rails: Mokena's Railroad Flagmen

   As we Mokenians know, the roots of our village lie not just in agriculture, but also in the steel rail. The Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad is the reason for the village’s very existence, and reflections on our collective past are filled with locomotives puffing soot. One image often overlooked in our minds’ eye is that of the humble wooden shack on the north side of the Mokena Street crossing. Aesthetically speaking, the little shanty was totally unremarkable, however it was from here that a generation of men worked a very important job. Known as flagmen for their tools of the trade, it was the responsibility of these Mokenians to assure safety at the railroad crossing in the days before electric gates. Working by themselves from the small hut, the flagmen were employees of the Rock Island who heralded the arrival of a train by standing in Mokena Street and waving a green flag, and later, a small stop sign.  

     While another flagman came to guard the Wolf Road crossing, the shack most widely remembered was the one that stood at the “depot crossing” on Mokena Street. Teasingly described by an early 20^th century journalist as a “mansion by the tracks”, the shanty was far from it – merely a small wooden building, roughly the size of a tollbooth, complete with a stove and at least two small windows. The exact date of its construction has long since been lost to time, but sagely residents of Mokena would remember the shack first appearing as a response to a deadly accident that occurred around 1900. Comparing these memories with the historical record, it appears likely that the calamity recalled was the death Irma Reese in 1896. A teenage relative of the McGovney family, she was killed by a rushing train for the simple yet tragic reason that she didn’t look both ways while crossing the tracks. 

 

    In the immediate aftermath of the accident, the village board asked the Rock Island to “place a flagman at Mokena Street on or before June 15^th, 1896.” Records indicate that a crossing guard had indeed been stationed at the crossing, but some unknown hiccup occurred that resulted in the railroad doing away with the flagman just as quickly as he had been posted. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, certain townsfolk unleashed a torrent of criticism on village trustees, who they perceived to be responsible for the guard’s absence. The buck was passed to the general manager of the Rock Island Railroad, and while he refused to have a flagman placed on Mokena Street, did compromise by suggesting that the local station helper perform the task. At a special meeting later that summer, Village Clerk John Liess drafted an indignant letter back to the company, wherein he described that this would be asking the impossible, for the overtaxed gent’s responsibilities already included “having to load and unload baggage, carry the mail bags to and from the post office” and “attending to the loading of milk and unloading of milk cans.”

 

    Regardless of when a flagman was permanently posted to the crossing and when his shelter was constructed, Mokena’s train passengers knew it as a place to chew the fat or find solace within its walls on cold winter mornings. Among the earliest Mokenians to work the flagman’s shack upon its installation were Patrick Brennan and Thomas Kiniry, both having settled in the village years before during its infancy.

 

     By 1909, Ferdinand Tonn was on regular duty there. A middle-aged man of German birth, Tonn waved a green flag, and was praised that year by the Joliet Weekly News as having great “artistic tastes and talents” when he spelled the village’s name in whitewashed brick and stone in the ground at the guardhouse. Not too long after this creation appeared, the status of Tonn’s shack as a hangout was threatened. The roadmaster of the Rock Island appeared in town to personally warn him not to allow people to gather there, and made it clear that any such huddlings were viewed as distractions from his duty. Apparently the order had no effect, for soon thereafter another was passed down, this one specifically mandating “no loafing”. 

 

Looking northwest toward Front Street, local flagman Ferdinand Tonn is seen here at his post on Mokena Street, circa 1915. (Image courtesy Richard Quinn)

 

     Ferdinand Tonn retired from his service at the crossing in 1922, at the lofty age of 70. At some point thereafter, Front Street resident and former butcher Paul Rinke Sr. took the helm, but it is unclear when and for how long.  Sometime around 1931, Harry Schoen succeeded Rinke as the Mokena Street flagman, who then manned the post for about thirteen years. Called “Slim” by folks around town, Schoen was a baseball fan whose radio carried the sounds of games down Front Street. One dramatic incident highlights Slim Schoen’s time as flagman, namely the bravery he displayed saving the lives of two local women in 1941. Only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the two ladies were disembarking from an eastbound train, when one of them took an unfortunate tumble. With a westbound locomotive barreling down on them from the other track, Schoen sprung into action and halted the departing eastbound, whereupon he then pressed the two ladies and himself flush against the side of a coach while the westbound sped past, a foot and a half from their faces. Miraculously, no one was hurt, although a local news report mentioned that they all “suffered greatly from excitement and shock.” 

 

A leisurely day at the "mansion by the tracks" around 1915. (Image courtesy Richard Quinn)

 

     While initially delayed by World War II, electric gates were first installed at the Mokena Street and Wolf Road crossings in the fall of 1944. Flagmen in the village were now made obsolete, and Slim Schoen was sent to Joliet to work on a crossing there. With no use for the flagmen’s shanty, the old haunt was sold privately and moved to the new Sunny Acres subdivision just north of town where it was converted into a shed. Noting the demise of the hut, Mokena’s News-Bulletin invoked its status in the village by referring to it as an “old landmark.” From here, it faded into the pages of history. While an era ended, the stories of the unique men who waved the flag here have forever been sealed into Mokena’s story. 

Unwanted Visitor: The Cruel Case of George and Emma Klose

   It’s the story of a Mokena family. An elderly brother and sister who should’ve been living out days of peace in the sunset of their lives, when they were visited by a heinous crime, one that garnered headlines around Will County. The long timeline of our village’s history is flecked with dots of unsavoriness, which can be found if one pulls back the covers and knows just where to look. On the record of the years is the deadly 1864 riot, the 1926 murder of sheriff’s deputy Walter Fisher, and even the robbery of the Mokena post office in 1937. One that might very well join this nefarious list is the Emma and George Klose case of 1962. 

   The family at the heart of this event, the Kloses, were an old one, one that stood for all that was upright. They were rugged, hardworking farm folk; sons and daughters of the soil, who were a vital part of the social fabric of old Mokena. Patriarch Louis Klose first showed up as a middle-aged man within the borders of Frankfort Township by way of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Ours was a neighborhood were many of his fellow countrymen had already made their home, and while history has kept from us the exact date in which he first set foot here, all indications are that it occurred in the 1850s, roughly congruent with the time Mokena was born in 1852. At some point between his arrival in our neck of the woods and 1860, Louis Klose carved out a home for himself on a tract of land bisected by the new Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad in the northern reaches of the township, at a place that years later was known as the southwestern corner of Route 45 and 187^th Street. 

 

   Over the years, while in the hands of subsequent generations of the Klose family, this quaint farm established by their forebear would come to encompass over 127 acres. As history would have it, by and by the geographical region in which the Klose estate found itself came to be called Summit Hill, in reference to its elevation relative to the rest of the township. In time, the large farm came into the hands of Louis Klose’s son John, who married Philipena Mast in 1871, the daughter of another long-established family. Like his father, John was a native of Bavaria, where he was born in 1850. The young Klose was brought to our environs as a four-year-old by his uncle Johann Zahn, who eventually would become an innkeeper in Mokena and no small figure in our burg’s narrative. 

 

   On his property northeast of the village, John Klose became successful raising livestock and running a dairy farm. He was an active Republican, served as a school director and was a member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church. He had a passion for horticulture, and transformed his farm into one of the most lush places in the Mokena area. He was called a “well-known, highly esteemed citizen of Frankfort Township”, while years after he passed in 1918, it would be said that “Mr. Klose had many friends in this part of the state who have the kindest recollections of him.”

 

   Any recounting of this pioneer family would be remiss not to detail the children of John and Philipena Klose. Their eldest was George, born in 1872, who never married and stayed on the family homestead. Next came Oscar in 1873, who moved to town around the turn of the 20^th century and became our village constable, sporting a dashing uniform and patrolling the streets in the early 1900s. John Philip came onto the scene in 1875, he later married and ran a 100-acre farm of his own a little east of the old Klose place. Emma rounded them out in 1881. Like her brother George, she never married, and spent her days on the homestead with him. Emma Klose was possessed of a gift for music, and sealed her place in immortality by writing and publishing her magnum opus, the jaunty Mokena March and Two Step in 1910.

The Klose farm as it appeared in 1955. Route 45 can be seen in the right foreground, with 187th Street at the top of the image. Today this piece of land is the site of Thunder Bowl on Old LaGrange Road. 

 

   The apple didn’t fall far from John Klose’s tree with his children George and Emma, who inherited his love of plants and trees. They kept up the work he started, and in 1928 alone, George planted 50 evergreens on the property, while Emma was said to “devote many hours to her large garden of flowers and plants.” While the brother and sister lived pastoral lives, they were no strangers to crime. In 1914, a horse, buggy and double set of harnesses were brazenly stolen from their brother John Philip Klose farm, just a stone’s throw from theirs. All in all though, things were generally peaceful in their patch of Midwestern earth. The idyll was shattered on July 12^th, 1962.

 

   On that terrifying, early Thursday morning, George Klose had already reached a respectable 90 years, while his younger sister Emma, was 81. The Route 45 the Kloses lived on in 1962 would be one completely unrecognizable to modern eyes. What is today a bustling suburban thoroughfare, was then a narrow road totally rural in character, rich in agricultural surroundings. Thick foliage in front of the Klose farmhouse shielded it to most passersby, which to the elderly siblings was a nice buffer from the outside world, but gave an upper hand to anyone with barbarity in his heart. 

 

   The first eerie red flag went up around 10 o’clock on Wednesday night, July 11^th. A rap was heard on the Kloses’ door, and when Emma answered it, she beheld a stranger in the rain, who asked to come inside and out of the elements. Rightly spooked by the man, she refused to let him in. The episode appeared to be over, until brother and sister awoke sometime around 2:00 the next morning in great shock, when they found the same man in their living room. He was rather short; they estimated he must have been about five feet, three inches tall, who wore a long white coat that hid his body type. He was young too, looking to be in his 20s, with a round face.

 

   He preceded to squirt a bulb syringe in Emma’s face, dousing her with ammonia. She defended herself by knocking the device out of the intruder’s hand, to which he responded by punching the elderly lady in the face. The same treatment was dealt out to George, who was knocked down and suffered a fractured jaw in the attack. The intruder demanded to know where the money was from the farm’s sale. He was slow on getting the news though – the farm had been sold ten years before, and the money gained from the sale had long since been invested. Even as the two protested there was no cash around, the burglar refused to take them at their word, and tied them to a pair of chairs. 

 

   The stranger began torturing George Klose, “twisting and bending” his fingers back, until in desperation, the elderly man admitted that there was some cash in an upstairs safe. The thief found the small, antique contraption and threw it down the stairs in an attempt to break it open. That having failed, he was able to find the key and make off with the money inside, about $400, which in today’s figures would equal roughly $3,700. Adding insult to, quite literally, injury, he took the keys for a car sometimes driven by Emma and left the house. Here he encountered a hitch, for when he drove out of the yard, the back wheels sunk themselves into a hole, and try as he may, the car wouldn’t budge. The brutal bandit took off on foot, disappearing into the night. 

 

   The trouble had only just begun for George and Emma. They were left tied up, and after hours of struggling, Emma got free at around 6 o’clock in the morning. After untying her brother, she made the horrifying discovery that their phone line had also been cut. The 81-year-old, after having been roughed up and bound for hours, was forced in the early morning dew to walk to the home of Paul Smith. The only problem was, that Smith was on the same party line as the Kloses, so his phone was also out. He drove into Frankfort to the intersection of Routes 30 and 45, where he called the sheriff’s department, as well as a doctor and ambulance from a service station. 

 

   The shocking brutality of this episode was front page news in Mokena’s News-Bulletin, and was also written up in the county seat’s Herald-News, with both papers screaming the news from their front pages. Investigators from the sheriff’s office said the would-be yegg had gained entrance to the farmhouse by breaking the front door. As to the suspect himself, lawmen were tight-lipped to the press, cryptically noting only that the physical description given to them by the elderly brother and sister matched an individual from the neighborhood who had recently gone missing. Whoever he was, he was familiar not only with the layout of the farm and its surroundings, but also with the fact that the Kloses kept a dozen dogs on the place, and knew that they were not to be feared. 

 

   George and Emma were taken to St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights, where staff kept press photographers away from them. As far as the historical record states, no justice was ever served in this case. George Klose lived for a further five years after the brutal attack, reaching the impressive age of 95 before he passed in 1967, when he was joined by his sister Emma two years later. Both came to repose in their family plot at St. John’s Cemetery in Mokena, a burial ground that their family had been using for 100 years by this point. The last vestige of the Klose farm, its huge dairy barn, disappeared in the early 1980s. Let us remember Emma and George Klose not for the abhorrent act endured by them in 1962, but instead for the fact that they were a peaceful Mokena family, one who tilled the soil, as did their parents and grandparents at the same spot. They helped feed America, and turned their own corner of our community into one of its most beautiful places.