Man of the Cloth: The Story of Rev. James R. Woodcock and the Mokena Methodist Congregation

   As time marches onward, we are swept up in a never-ending news cycle, and are bombarded with momentous events, so many that the average citizen is hard pressed to keep track of them all. We live in history-making days. Even the home front is not immune, as Mokena’s United Methodist Church is winking out, and merging its ranks with our neighbors in the New Lenox congregation. The Mokena Methodists have been part of our community for 155 years, no small feat of longevity, having provided a spiritual stronghold to the hearts of countless faithful villagers since 1867. Many men and women of the cloth have tended to our local assembly over the years, and for the flock’s centennial in 1967 a tally was made that counted 49 ministers up to that point. On this long list of spiritual leaders, Rev. James R. Woodcock’s name appears, who manned the pulpit in the years 1883 to 1887. Even when his tenure was up, his association with Mokena didn’t end. 

   Even before Rev. Woodcock came to Mokena, the Methodist Episcopal church, as it was fashioned in his time, was possessed of an interesting history. As early as 1855, a mere three years after Mokena was laid out and the iron horse of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad first puffed across the prairie, Methodist religious services were being held at the new schoolhouse. This group of the faithful weathered the trauma of the Civil War, and under the leadership of Rev. Lucius Hawkins on the blessed winter day of December 15^th, 1867, finally dedicated a church of their own on Mokena’s public square. All in all, the new church, described as “very neat and commodious” cost the young congregation $1,500, which was paid for by the members of the flock. Years later, they would recall that the sale of a stray horse also helped chip in to the building fund. 

The Methodist Episcopal Church of Mokena, as seen circa 1915. This historic structure stood at today's 11099 Second Street.

 

   It is important to note that during the church’s halcyon days, their sanctuary was shared on alternate Sundays with the village’s Baptists; a Union Sunday School was even conducted under the wing of the Baptist deacon Rollin Marshall, who was a Mokena pioneer in his own right. Several decades later this accord would play out in a dramatic way, when a particularly bitter lawsuit erupted between the two congregations as to who the rightful owner of the church was. When the dust settled in 1899, the Methodists were ruled the legal owners of the property, which led to the extinction of the local Baptist assemblage for decades. 

 

   While an early historian wrote that the Methodist flock was “rather small”, they were prosperous enough in the fall of 1874 to dedicate a parsonage for the use of their pastor and his family, the house still standing today on the southeast corner of Mokena and Second Streets. The edifice cost a hefty $1,000, and the ribbon cutting was rung in with an oyster dinner. 

 

   Only two years after Mokena was incorporated, Rev. James R. Woodcock received the call to helm our Methodist Episcopal church in the fall of 1882, and for his work earned a salary of $500 a year, which was upped in his second year in the village to $550. His arrival made him tenth pastor to man the pulpit since the church’s founding sixteen years before. 

 

   Rev. Woodcock was a freshly minted 30-year-old pastor, and our community was to be his first charge. He acclimated well with the village, with our local correspondent to the Will County Advertiser noting in the October of his first year that he “is meeting remarkable success as a minister.” A year after his arrival, Rev. Woodcock’s Sunday school boasted of a robust 81 pupils, and while the Methodist sanctuary didn’t have a choir or an organ when he got to it, before his tenure was over, he had provided for both. The reverend and his wife Annie, along with their 2-year-old daughter Grace, lived in the parsonage on Mokena Street, which was the scene of a soiree given in honor of Mrs. Woodcock the following March. The same correspondent described the night as “one of those pleasant social episodes… that helps to dispel the drudging of the every-day routine of life”, the guests all arriving for tea in costumes. The hostess herself was clad as “Lady Washington”, teenage Mokenian Belle Jones was Queen Elizabeth, and 16-year-old neighbor Jennie Hatch as “Miss Fry, a Quaker.” “Games and other social amusements” were had, and at the end of the night, all who were there “declared it was the most pleasant affair of the season.” Mrs. Woodcock quickly found her place in Mokena, and also began giving painting lessons to neighborhood students. 

 

   While the seat of Rev. Woodcock’s ministry was Mokena, he was also responsible for the Methodist congregations at Goodings Grove in Homer Township and what in his era was informally called the English Settlement, which corresponded to an area in today’s Orland Township. He traversed his circuit by horse and buggy, nothing to sneeze at in the days when road conditions in our neck of the woods were often less than ideal. He was adored by his flock, as was abundantly shown on October 26^th, 1883, when the Woodcocks were surprised at the parsonage by about 25 Orlanders. A bountiful dinner was had, and our friend at the Will County Advertiser said that “best of all, English settlement folks never come empty handed”, for they showered Rev. Woodcock with butter, eggs, flour, cheese, corn, oats and “a little pile of Uncle Sam’s script and coins.”

 

   The reverend and his family were transferred to a new charge in Nebraska in September 1884, and thus their time in our quiet railroad town came to a conclusion. The years marched forward and life went on, and the Methodist Episcopal church stood like a rock in Mokena, weathering every change that came its way. Along the way, pastor Woodcock picked up the additional title of doctor, and after the passage of many years, in the fall of 1926, he made his triumphant return to Mokena. He found many changes in our fair burg, the village was now lit by electricity, autos plied the streets, and the rugged farm lane just west of town now carried a proper name, that of Wolf Road. One of the first things he did after arriving in Mokena was to visit his old church, and in doing so, re-discovered a veritable Rosetta Stone of the congregation’s history. He found a marble-topped communion table in the sanctuary, and after knowingly removing the marble top, he brought to light an inscription on its bottom from the church’s earliest days, it having read:

 

“This church was dedicated on the 15^th day of December, 1867. The dedicatory sermon was preached by Rev. Dr. Kidder of Evanston, Ill. The pastor of the church was Rev. Lucius Hawkins. P.E. (Presiding Elder) of the District – Rev. W.F. Stewart.”

 

   It was said the words were just as legible then as the day they were inscribed. This tablet, a priceless piece of local history, has since been lost to the winds of time. 

 

   A little over a year later, in December 1927, the Methodist congregation marked a big anniversary, namely 60 years since their sanctuary was dedicated. At this time, Mokenian Ella Cooper, a dedicated member of the church, reached out to Rev. Woodcock at his home in southern California to see what he might remember of his days in the village. Dr. Rev. Woodcock and Mrs. Cooper began exchanging letters and renewing their acquaintance.

 

   The newfound correspondence between the two piqued the interest of William Semmler, the editor of our erstwhile newspaper, The News-Bulletin, who in a very prescient move, preserved their letters for posterity by printing them in his publication. In a note dated April 11^th, 1927, Dr. Rev. Woodcock remembered how “a commodious barn belonged to the parsonage property”, and further reminisced on his first wedding in Mokena: 

 

“We had not tacked down our carpets, when some friends from Joliet, where we had been living drove up and insisted that I should marry them, and after some hesitation on my part, I did. We had no cake to pass out, but did have a merry-making time.”

 

   He also reflected on his preaching beat, and the roughness of travel in that era: “How piercing cold those winters were. I froze myself on one trip around the circuit, and many times the snow was so deep that I drove over the top of stake-and-rider fences.” Aside from dealing with grueling weather, ministering was also physically demanding, as Dr. Rev. Woodcock recalled that in the beginning “I had to lead all the singing, do the preaching, and then follow up with strenuous exhorting.” Reflecting the mostly Germanic makeup of Mokena in his day, he went on to note “I was the only English-speaking minister for miles around, the Germans abounded; and so it was that I married a good many people, conducted numerous funerals, and baptized a lot of children and adults.” As Dr. Rev. Woodcock reflected upon his flock, he remembered one couple in particular: 

 

“How wonderfully the Lord saved them! He was the most profane man in the neighborhood; he swore so loud he could be heard a half mile, and some people wouldn’t have him work for them on their buildings, he was a carpenter, but when God saved him, He did a complete work, and he became one of the most humble and sweet-spirited men I ever knew, and his wife was just as devoted. It was he whom I secured to build the Goodings Grove church.”

 

   Dr. Rev. Woodcock kept up his holy work until he passed away in the spring of 1942 in Missouri. His story is but one of the many over the decades to be closely associated with this local group of the faithful. As the sun sets upon the Mokena United Methodist Church, may we remember those who built the congregation, and those who labored with all of their hearts over the past century and a half to keep it afloat. 

School Days: The Story of Elizabeth Cappel

   “School days, school days/Dear old Golden Rule days/’Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic/Taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick.” Mokena’s schools have a rich tradition that stretches back to 1855, a mere three years after the arrival of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad and the subsequent laying out of the village. The school has come a long way since that first, simple structure on the public square, and students and faculty have been many over these last 167 years, and compiling a complete history of this establishment would be a gargantuan undertaking. Nevertheless, it would be impossible to understand this all-encompassing subject without first knowing Mrs. Elizabeth Cappel, one of the most honored women in Mokena’s story. Not only did she serve as a teacher in the venerated public school on Carpenter Street, but she also became the institution’s principal and superintendent. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Cappel of Mokena, circa 1955. (Image courtesy of Richard Quinn)

   Born Elizabeth M. Krusemark on November 30^th, 1898, her story begins far from Mokena, on the southern border of Minnesota, where she grew up in the young community of Truman. Even teachers have to go to school, and our heroine went to hers in her hometown. Elizabeth broke the mold, and climbed the ladder of education in a time when more than a few of her contemporaries wouldn’t finish elementary school, she attending not only high school, but also graduating from teachers’ college in Mankato, Minnesota in 1925, being the proud owner of a BE degree. A newly-minted educator, she began teaching in rural Minnesota schools, while also spending a year working on an Indian reservation. 

 

   In 1929, the year of the stock market crash, the twists of chance led Elizabeth Krusemark to Mokena. While sojourning with kin in our neck of the woods, she learned that a teaching spot in the village was open, and promptly applied for it. The Mokena of 1929 was a vastly different place from today’s community, counting a little over 500 residents in a rural railroad town. Miss Krusemark was interviewed by school board members Elmer Cooper and Ona McGovney, respectfully the owner of the successful Cooper & Hostert Ford agency on Front Street and a village insurance agent. She made a good impression and ultimately got the job, although years later Mr. Cooper would remember “The only thing against her was that (I) was afraid she would only stay one year.”

 

   Miss Krusemark went to work in the brand-new, $29,000 school on Carpenter Street, District 159 having just that year vacated the elegant yet aging older building on the corner of Front Street and Schoolhouse Road. Her workplace was state of the art, a fireproof building consisting of a gymnasium (the village’s first) and four classrooms that were used by the school’s 125 pupils, some of which belonged to Mokena’s two-year high school. Two of Miss Krusemark’s earliest students were young Hans Mueller and Eddie Yunker, both of whom continued their work with her when they later served on the district’s board of education. 

The former main entrance of the Mokena Public School, today the Village Hall. 

 

   As she made her new home in Mokena, in 1930 Elizabeth Krusemark boarded with the Frederick and Violette Whitlark family on Second Street, then shortly thereafter with the Harold and Myrtle Coopers on Third Street. Alas, it wasn’t long after being welcomed within the gates of our community that wedding bells rung; a few days after New Year’s 1936, Elizabeth eloped to Iowa with Albert Cappel. A familiar face around town, Albert Cappel ran a local feed and coal business of long standing on Mokena Street with his brother Fred. Eleven years previously, Albert had become a widower when his wife Clara passed, and upon his second marriage, Elizabeth Cappel became stepmother to Wesley, Harold, and Marvin. 

 

   Having a position of authority in the Mokena school, it was inevitable that many cases requiring discipline came before Mrs. Cappel. Decades after her time in our midst, stories of reverence would still be told about her wooden paddle fashioned from part of an orange crate. In the classroom, she had to maintain an assertive stance, and didn’t tolerate fooling around, but nevertheless kept a special place in her heart for her students, and upon graduation, would let them affectionately call her Kruzi. Elizabeth wore more than a few hats in the village, having led Mokena’s first girl scout troop, and would also coach boys’ and girls’ basketball, a perennial favorite sport in town. 

 

   As the world was in the grip of the Second World War, 1944 proved to be a significant year for Mrs. Cappel’s career in more ways than one. Sunlight shone by making her principal then, but storm clouds gathered when, in the grind of war, various hardships such as lack of available teachers caused District 159’s two-year high school to go defunct. Things turned up in 1951 when, under her watch, a $52,000 addition to the school was built, consisting of two new classrooms, a kitchen and shower rooms. Three years later, in 1954, there were 225 grade schoolers in her care, at which time a contemporary said “Mrs. Cappel is both loved by her pupils and highly respected by their parents and community as a whole.” The feeling was mutual, as she would say that “the people have been so grand” in Mokena. 

 

   Mrs. Cappel retired in 1962, at that time having the superintendent’s chair. After the completion of Willowcrest five years previously, she continued to work in the old halls on Carpenter Street as well as in the new school. In her 33 years as an educator in Mokena, she taught many town youngsters whose parents had also been her students, and in early 1963 was honored by our Chamber of Commerce as one of the village’s most distinguished citizens. On August 16^th of that year, Elizabeth Cappel passed into eternal memory, and the sun set upon the life and career of a Mokenian that hasn’t been equaled since. In 1975, the old school on Carpenter Street was christened the Elizabeth Cappel School, in honor of the woman who labored tirelessly there for so many years. Nowadays our city hall, it’s impossible to behold this edifice and not feel her resolute influence. 

Decorated in Flames: The Martin Hall Fire of 1912

     A community draws strength in the gathering of its citizens. They come together in settings where ideas are shared, grand plans hatched, and friendships are sealed. Groups of neighbors need a spot where they are comfortable, yet one that is in the heart of the place they call home. The untimely loss of such an important landmark can leave a neighborhood reeling, such as the one Mokena experienced 110 years ago in the great fire that destroyed Martin Hall on Front Street. 

    In the spirit of American entrepreneurship, Mokenian Frank Liess opened a general store on Front Street in May 1901. His brother Charles later joined him in partnership, and while they weren’t the only shopkeepers in town, they served a Mokena where around 300 souls lived and joined a smattering of enterprises such as a blacksmith and a butcher, along with a drugstore and some saloons. Three years after the store opened, the building was spruced up with an addition, and the second floor of the structure was remade into a large multi-purpose space, which quickly came to be known throughout the region as Liess Hall. 

 

     Sporting a roomy dance floor, the space also had a ticket office, cloakroom, and its own entrance from Front Street. It was a popular gathering spot for Mokena’s fraternal orders; everyone from the Modern Woodmen of America to the Royal Neighbors called Liess Hall home. Not only did the village board convene in the hall for a period, it was also a focal point of social activity in the community. Any given week in early 20^thcentury Mokena might find a masquerade ball, play, church bazaar or even a magic lantern show taking place – the latter being the forerunner to today’s movies. 

Today's 11018 Front Street, formerly the site of Liess Hall.

 

     The hall, along with the store on its street level, passed into the hands of the unfortunately named Lemuel Cramp in 1911, and the following year became the property of John A. Martin, a recent Mokena arrival by way of downstate Jefferson County. The countless hours of joy that took place within these walls were overshadowed by disaster, when a catastrophic fire struck the hall on July 24^th, 1912. 

 

     From a standpoint at her residence across the street and a few yards to the southeast, widowed mother Bertha Groth was jarred from her slumbers by the acrid smell of smoke, and when she looked out her bedroom window at about 2:30am, she spotted Martin Hall aflame, likely being the first Mokenian to see it, saying that she saw “flames breaking through the walls and roof of the Martin building.” She hurried across to the street to the saloon of her brother-in-law, John Groth, to notify him of the impending calamity. Word traveled over electric wire in the dark night to 20-year-old village switchboard operator Mary Rinke, who became a pioneer when she used her telephone to alert her fellow townspeople of the emergency unfolding on Front Street. Later that day, it was said that Mary managed to call everyone in town.

 

   Around the same time as Bertha Groth made her dreadful discovery, a tinsmith neighbor of hers named Henry Carsten caught sight of a flame through a first floor window of the building. He told a local newspaper that the light was “not larger than a lantern”, before it suddenly exploded before his eyes. 

 

       As townspeople and the volunteer fire department rushed to the scene, it became abundantly clear that it was too late to save Martin Hall. As the inferno wrapped itself around the building, the threat of half the town burning with it became very real. Flaming pieces of debris landed on the general store of Catharine Sippel next door to the west, on Charles Moriarty’s feed shed across Front Street, and on the home of Ernest Lehnert, a few doors down the road. Blistering flames also licked 30-year-old Ed Stellwagen, who armed with buckets of water, fought to protect his property on the east side of the blaze. His roof having caught on fire a few times, the day proved to be exceedingly unlucky for him. While he ultimately saved his buildings, they did take damage not only from the flames but also from water, and he carried no insurance. To add insult to injury, he complained that someone took $50 from his vest that was tossed aside while fighting the fire.  

 

    Despite the efforts of Mokena’s citizens, Martin Hall couldn’t be saved, and was consigned to a heap of charred wood. John Martin estimated the total loss came out to about $15,000. The members of local organizations who met in the hall discovered that their charters were lost in the blaze, and while a safe was fished out of the wreckage that managed to keep some of their valuable papers intact, some time had to pass before it was cool enough to open. Within a few days, State Deputy Fire Marshal L.C. McMurtry made the trek to town to investigate the scene, where he turned up nothing useful. If anyone ever found a definite answer as to what caused the conflagration, it was never recorded for posterity. Conflicting stories on the fire’s origin made their rounds in Mokena, some of which were tinged with raised eyebrows and suspicion. Local sage Clinton Kraus later cryptically reflected that “none could be proven…best to forget!” 

 

    Within days of the fire, the Joliet Herald reported that a collection was being taken up in town to help repair Ed Stellwagen’s property. Meanwhile, Mr. Martin claimed that he would rebuild his hall once odds and ends with his insurance were settled, and that this time, the place would be fireproof. Alas, it never happened, and he left town. The old focal point of the village, where so many memories were made, stood at the site of today’s Avalanche Jewelry at 11018 Front Street. Perhaps not coincidentally, a new and improved hall was built on the site around a year after the blaze, a building which itself was taken by another disastrous fire in 1993. As it seems, irony plays no favorites. 

Ach So Giftig: The Story of the 1889 Dall Murders

   Mokena has the proud reputation of being a peaceable place, a name built on the relationships built by longstanding neighbors and friends who care for their community. Nevertheless, readers of this page have seen that the chronicle of our village’s history is dotted with islands of miscontent. Various things have happened over the years that are looked back upon with unsavoriness, be they theft of property, targeted arson, and various other distasteful deeds. Once in a lifetime, however, comes along an act so heinous that it sticks out prominently on the annals of time like a sore thumb. Parting the cobwebs and brushing away the dust, we find a case so salacious, so ghastly, that one has to read it to believe it. On that note, the author would like to introduce the 1889 Dall murders. 

   The story begins across a storm-tossed sea, in what is now western Germany. It was almost halfway through the first half of the 19^th century, and Jonathan Dall and Amalia Hartkopf were a married couple, making their way in the world as best they could. Like so many of their generation, the Dall family had been compelled to seek a better life on America’s shores at a time when their German home was rife with instability and revolution. The Dalls were natives of the area around Solingen, long renown for the high-quality knives produced in the region. There the elder Dall worked as a cutler, before picking up stakes with his family in 1848 as unrest reared its head and sailing across the choppy Atlantic for seven weeks. Eight children would be born to Jonathan and Amalia’s union, among whom were young Bertha, Ida, Eduard, Emma, and Jonathan. The names of the others, who don’t appear to have reached adulthood, are lost to time. The new Americans made their way to the Prairie State by way of New Orleans, where Jonathan Dall Sr. came into possession of a sizeable tract of land in Kendall County, before trying his hand at blacksmithing for a spell. All roads led to farming, however, and after tilling the soil again in Kendall County, the Dall family made their way to Will County at the end of the 1850s, before ultimately settling outside Mokena, then a neat little hamlet on the new Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. 

 

   Having already established itself as a center for Germanic settlement, the Dalls’ presence in the newly-formed Frankfort Township was something of an anomaly with their status as Rhinelanders, as most of their Teutonic brethren in our midst were Bavarians, Hessians and Mecklenburgers. They found a place with the German United Evangelical St. John’s Church in Mokena, and had a great deal of success after establishing a 160-acre farm on the eastern side of today’s LaPorte Road and Route 45. In 1860, it was estimated to be worth $5,500, and was quite a bustling operation – with three horses, eight cows, and four swine. Things were humming along that year, as Jonathan Dall Sr. estimated that the farm has produced 500 bushels of Indian corn, 300 pounds of butter, and 40 tons of hay. While living on this farm, he also served as path master and road commissioner, two prominent positions in township government, while one contemporary simply stated that the Dalls “were people of the highest character.” 

 

   Sometime around the end of the Civil War, the Dalls sold the farm and moved to a new one just a short carriage ride west of Mokena in New Lenox Township. It was down a country lane that bisected the estate of old settlers, the Marshall family, that also ran along the edge of that clan’s family cemetery, of which just to the northwest the Dalls lived. Bigger than their last farm, the new home property measured in at a stately 196 acres, and would later be cleaved by the new Wabash Railroad. It was here that Jonathan Dall Sr passed away on June 30^th, 1885 after a battle with pneumonia. The 72-year-old’s earthly remains were borne to St. John’s Cemetery, where they were laid to rest. So it was that Eduard and Jonathan Jr then became the men of the farm. It bears repeating to the modern reader that nineteenth century life was far from easy, and fate once again struck the Dall family when Eduard too succumbed on October 15^th, 1887 on the family farm at the young age of 34 years. He was a casualty of the dreaded malady of typhoid fever, and thus his younger brother, 31-year-old Jonathan Jr, described as “quiet, unostentatious, and hard-working” became the sole head of the farm. 

The old farmhouse on the Dall place, as it appears on modern-day Regan Road.

 

   By 1889, “peace, prosperity and plenty” abounded at the Dall homestead, and as that year was wrapping up, the household consisted of Jonathan, his 71-year-old mother Amalia, and a 17-year-old housekeeper named Sabina Schenkel who was there on and off, whose parents and siblings lived close to Mokena. Also present on the estate was a farmhand named John Scheffler, who remains a shadowy figure on the historical narrative, the only details having survived are that he was about 24 years old and a recent German immigrant. As such things happen when a man and a woman are in each other’s circles for an extended length of time, Jonathan and Fena, as Sabina Schenkel was called, became an item. Some would later say that they were actually engaged. As fate would have it, however, there was more to the situation than would meet the eye. There was a third person in the mix. Enter at this point the hired man John Scheffler, who also vied for Fena’s eye, and was consumed with a burning jealousy for Jonathan Dall. He maliciously plotted his boss’s undoing. 

 

   Christmas had come and passed, and Monday, December 30^th, 1889 had bloomed uneventfully at the Dall domicile. That morning, Amalia got to work making breakfast for the house, part of which was made up of bounteous helpings of hot coffee and fresh beef. As the first cups were poured, the Dalls and hired man Scheffler noticed right away that something wasn’t quite right with it. This batch was hastily gotten rid of, and a second pot brewed. Something was still off with it though, it being described as “bitter and bad”, but all were resigned to the matter by this point, and mother and son Dall and Scheffler nevertheless drank it down. 

 

   At this juncture in the story, there is an abrupt change in the day’s events, when, with alarming rapidity, all three became ill, John and Amalia Dall violently so. The two took to their beds, and grasping at straws, John Scheffler put forth the idea that the copper kettle that the meat was stored in must have caused it to go bad. Sinking rapidly, Amalia Dall suggested to him to have some sweet milk, at which point he felt better. Being able to be up and about, his employers sent him into Mokena to bring Dr. Edmund Lynch to the farm. Upon his arrival, the medicine man was flummoxed as to the cause of their sudden illness, and did the best he could for them, which after all was said and done, still provided precious little comfort to the suffering man and elderly woman. While tending to his quickly failing patients, the Dalls made a riveting revelation to the Civil War veteran: both of them separately told him that this was no case of tainted meat, that they believed Scheffler had poisoned them.

 

   That afternoon, young Fena Schenkel came to the Dall house from Mokena and helped nurse her fiancé and future mother-in-law. Jonathan confided to her in the same way he had to Dr. Lynch, but this time went into a little more detail, adding that the first pot of coffee that had been drank from had a strange white powder in it. Someone in the house examined the used coffee grounds, and it would be remembered that they were “of an unusual appearance.” The coffee pot was given a good cleaning, and yet a third serving made, of which this time Fena took a cup. She immediately became ill. Luckily, Dr. Lynch was able to quickly give her an antidote, and she was soon back on her feet. 

 

   Neighboring farmer Chester Marshall was also helping in any way he could, while Dr. Frank Searles of New Lenox was also called in, but try as the two physicians may, Amalia Dall expired at eight o’clock that night. Jonathan Dall strongly kept fighting even though his body was wracked with intolerable pain, but lost his battle the next morning, the frosty last day of 1889. With their dying words, until the very end, Jonathan and Amalia Dall pointed the finger at John Scheffler. 

 

   As the new year dawned over Will County, newspaper readers were greeted with ghastly headlines. “A Horrible Crime” shouted the Joliet Republic and Sun, while the Chicago Daily Tribune’s masthead read “Love, Poison and Revenge.” The dreadful events received widespread media coverage, having made not only the papers in those two nearby places, but were carried in publications from as far away as Kansas and Massachusetts. Headlines were also garnered in the Abendpost and the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, two of the state’s foremost German papers.

 

   On New Year’s morning, an inquest was held by Coroner Andrew J. Mills at the Dall house. The jury was made up of a veritable who’s who of Mokenians: cattleman Christian Bechstein, farmer John Huwiler, retired gentleman Nicholas Marti, attorney Arthur W. McGovney, and constable Charles Schiek, with former mayor Ozias McGovney serving as foreman. The testimonies of the doctors present, Chester Marshall, Fena Schenkel and even John Scheffler were taken, through an interpreter in the case of the latter. Scheffler, who the Chicago Daily Tribune described as “a dull, stupid-looking fellow (who) has nothing to say” stayed by his story, that the deaths were caused by tainted meat from the copper kettle. Dr. Searles had a chance previously to examine the kettle, and testified that there was nothing about it that could have caused such ferocious illnesses. Scheffler’s claims were not given much credence, and at the end of their deliberations, the coroner’s jury recorded that the Dalls “came to their death through the effect of some poisonous substance supposed to be administered by one John Scheffler and would recommend that he be held to the grand jury.” With that, Coroner Mills issued a warrant for his arrest, and the farmhand was whisked off to the county jail. 

 

   Many questions remained unanswered after the deaths, such as what exactly the poisonous substance was that caused the Dalls’ demise. In an effort to get to the bottom of this matter, a postmortem examination was held on them by Dr. Lynch and his colleague, Dr. William Becker, also of Mokena. Dr. Becker removed their stomachs and brought them to a laboratory at Rush Medical College in Chicago, in hopes that the chemist there could shed light on the issue. If any new leaves were overturned, the results have disappeared like sand into the winds of time. Mother and son were buried at St. John’s Cemetery, just south of Mokena, on January 2^nd, 1890. In the entries for the Dalls in the church’s German language Totenregister, or Registry of the Dead, long-standing pastor Carl Schaub wrote “Math: 24,42” in the margin next to Jonathan’s name, likely a reference to Matthew 24:42, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”

The Dall family plot in St. John's Cemetery. Amalia and Jonathan Dall Jr. are buried under the monument at left. (Image courtesy of Michael Philip Lyons)

 

   In the aftermath of the Dalls’ untimely passing, there remained the not-so-small issue of settling their estate. There were a few open accounts from area merchants that hadn’t been cleared up, such as that of John Zahn & Son of Mokena, Front Street hardware merchants who had sold Jonathan Dall a soup ladle, skimmer and tin pan earlier in December. Especially prominent in the proceedings of the probate court was the aforementioned Dr. Becker of Mokena, who billed the estate $10 each for the transportation of the Dalls’ stomachs to the Garden City, 85 cents for his train fare, and a further $4.25 for his hack and hotel bills. 

 

   Before long, a fateful day came, and what should have been a moment of reckoning, instead turned out to be what may have been one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Will County history. The grand jury convened in Joliet and closed their work on Saturday morning, February 1^st, 1890. Most of their time had been taken up with the Dall case, and the jurors had heard an abundance of testimony from many different witnesses, including the Chicago chemist who examined the victims’ stomachs. In a wild, unexpected turn, the grand jury ruled that all the evidence was circumstantial, and John Scheffler, who had been in custody since the inquest, was ordered released. 

 

   Then, as is the historian’s lament, all impressions, jottings and reports of this dreadful case disappear from the pages of the historical record. As intensely as it had captivated journalists of the day, their interests were drawn elsewhere as quickly as their gazes had focused on the farm west of Mokena. In retelling any story of this age, certain details fall victim to the ages and are gone forever, and countless bits and pieces have fallen between the cracks, where they’ll stay forever. As such, it’s unknown how Fena Schenkel, the woman in the middle, moved on with the rest of her life. Five years after that awful end of 1889, she married an out-of-towner and went on to have at least four children. She moved to Chicago, where she spent the rest of her days before passing on in 1948. Incidentally, her older brother Conrad Schenkel would wear a star as Mokena’s constable for a long span in the early 20^th century. Most frustrating, however, is determining the fate of John Scheffler. After February 1890, his name is wiped clean from recorded history. Did he stay in Will County, or decamp to a far-off place? Did the dreadful stigma of this case and the accusations leveled against him follow him for the rest of his days? There is no one living who can say. 

 

   The monuments in the Dall family plot are easily findable in St. John’s Cemetery, being among the tallest on the grounds. The German words spelled in gothic lettering, chiseled by hand into the stone, have been nearly obliterated by the decades of extreme Midwestern weather, but can still read in just the right amount of sunlight with the help of patient fingertips. The old Dall house still stands on today’s Regan Road, bearing silent witness to the horrors of 130 years ago, its current inhabitants likely unaware of the cruelty that played out within its walls.

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.