It was 137 years ago today...

Driving down Front Street nowadays, most Mokenians probably don't pay too much attention to the business they pass. They're simply part of the landscape, and their existence could easily be taken for granted. However, if one would mention C & J Silkscreening, Little Al's, or FD Printing, most people would probably be able to place these longtime Mokena businesses immediately.

However, in 2010, would anyone have a clue who Valentine Scheer or John Schuberth were? Or even why they'd be mentioned in the same breath as Front Street?

Pause a minute, turn back the clock to the late 19th century, and repeat these names to these first passerby you encounter here. In their time, everyone in Mokena would've known these two men, their goods, what the inside of their shops looked like, you even would've known if the two men trusted you on credit.

Valentine Scheer, a feed dealer and harness maker, and John Schuberth, a hardware merchant, were both immigrants from Bavaria whose families were among the first Germanic settlers of what would later become Frankfort Township. Lore has it that Mr. Schuberth built the house seen here in 1862, although it's been difficult to tack down when Mr. Scheer's shop was constructed. In any case, it was probably right around the same time or maybe even a few years later.

The Schuberth place burned to the ground in a mysterious fire in the 1920s. Today, Dina's Barber Shop stands at the same location. Years ago, a family member of Valentine Scheer's stated that the building in the image here is the same one that still exists today as the Baker building. (A few doors east from the intersection of Front and Mokena Street) What happened to the lower portion of the building we see on the right side of the image? Did Scheer have it torn down at some point, or did he separate it, and move it somewhere else? I'm sure there's a cool story behind that.

These two images came from an 1873 plat map of Will County that just about every rural landowner in this neighborhood had in his home. In what was then a fairly common practice, well-to-do business owners payed a fee to the plat's publisher to have a likeness of their shop included in the pages of the volume. A few quick sketches would've been done by the artist on the street, and later after some honing, he would've converted them into the lithographs you see here.

Photographs of the town from this era of Mokena's history are really, really hard to come by. Not many are even known to exist. They're holy grails of our village's history. What you're seeing here are some of the very earliest visual depictions of the Mokena in any form. Just think, all this 8 years after the Civil War ended!