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The Catholic Post Sunday November 19, 1978 A Pioneer Mission Revisited - Mooney Settlement
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One hundred and fifty years vanished with the snap of the fingers this week as a pioneer Catholic mission came to life again. Thomas Mooney, patriarch of the Mooney Settlement between Peoria and Chillicothe, all but rose from his grave; the foundation stones of the old St. Joseph Church, one of the very first in the diocese, seemed to reassemble, and the Irish Catholics that lie beneath the gravemarkers in the churchyard came back in memory. While there is little physical evidence left today on that windy knoll on West Rome Rd. that the Mooney Settlement once revolved around a tiny country church on this spot, descendants of the small band of Irish Catholics hold letters, pictures, and newspaper clippings and cherished recollections that give a rare dimension to that important era and flesh and color to its people. This week they shared them with Catholic Post readers. There’s Joe Carroll; he’s 82, and unofficial keeper of the Mooney history. He was baptized in the old church and, with Hugh Mooney, was probably the last of the altar boys to serve Mass there. And there’s Marcella Knight, who’s grandfather and great grandfather are buried in the Mooney cemetery and who inherited the task of keeping the plot trimmed and mowed. She has delegated the task that one belonged to her grandfather, father and then her brother, to Ryburn McKenzie, another descendant who farmed just around the corner from the cemetery and remembers the community well. “All this,” says McKenzie, sweeping his arm to left and right on a recent visit, “used to be solid Mooney’s and Mowbrays on both sides of the road.” And then he explains how the settlement started, how veterans of the War of 1812 were paid in land, not money, and how one veteran sold his parcel of Illinois territory to Thomas Mooney of New York City in 1818. “Mooney had been born in Ireland and came here with his family when he was 14 years old in 1798. He became a grocer, had a wife and four sons and a daughter, and he bought the 160 acres of land for $1 an acres.” The family moved west in 1835, McKenzie reports, after threat of Indian violence had subsided at the end of the Black Hawk War. It was an arduous trip, the family traveled to Albany by way of the Hudson river, through the Erie Canal to Buffalo, by lake steamer to Cleveland, then across to Portsmouth on the Ohio River, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to the Illinois and up the Illinois river to Peoria. The trip took four weeks. The family spent two years living in a log cabin, the first in the settlement, at the intersection of West Rome and Galena Rd. But Mooney prospered, a frame home was soon built and the astute landowner increased his holdings. (The 1873 plat book shows he and his descendants controlled 1,280 acres.) Following his example, other Irish Catholics in New York came west and settled in his community. Soon there were Boylans, O’Byrnes, McDonnells, Mowbrays, Mallens, Dolans, Plunketts, Carrolls and McKenzies and with the neighborhood growing, Mooney applied for and received a permit for a post office which he named Helena, after his wife, and which he maintained in his own home. Helena was on the stage route between Peoria and Galena and long before the Peoria and Bureau railroad was built all mail came by stage. The fee on a letter from New York was 25 cents, and was paid by the recipient. McKenzie pauses in his narration to point out the foundation lines of the pioneer church located in the center of the five acre plot. “Mooney donated five acres and $500 toward the building of St. Joseph’s church in 1855. Priests came to say Mass from Peoria, then from Henry, and later from Chillicothe. When the old church was torn down in the ‘30s, on orders of Bishop Schlarman, the main altar was taken to St. Edward’s church in Chillicothe, and when the new St. Edward’s was built, the altar was put in the chapel of the nuns’ convent.”
McKenzie who grew up in Peoria but farmed his own 160 acres near the cemetery until 1971, traces his family back to Thomas Mooney, his great great grandfather. He and his wife, Goldie, are long time, long active members of St. Edward’s parish, Chillicothe. Another Mooney descendant, T. Joseph Carroll, remembers many a Mass in old St. Joseph’s when the priest took the train down from Henry, then was met by a parishioner who took him the rest of the way by wagon. The little church, he says, was heated with a stove, and on cold days someone would start it up early so the church would be warm for the services. Carroll grew up in the Mooney settlement - “I lived on the farm until 1927 when I went to Brown’s Business College” - and he attended Mooney School, also called the Reed School, which was located at the crossroads. “It was a one room school, and there weren’t enough seats for all the students so the older boys had to stand in back. My father married Jane Mallen,” he says, “and her mother was a Mooney.” He recalls family history easily, says it was a tradition that all newcomers from Ireland came to stay at his grandfather’s house. The grandfather was Henry Mallen, who had come from Ireland as a “bound boy” to Thomas Mooney and later married his daughter, Mary. The patriarch of the settlement made his home with the couple after his own wife died in 1853.
Carroll, who is retired from the insurance business and lives with his wife, Louise, in St. Philomena parish, Peoria, also remembers the piety of his family and its recitation of the rosary. This became a trail during corn-husking time, he says, because he was often so tired he fell asleep. But he adds that two sisters joined Religious orders; Sister Mary Louise, now deceased and Sister Mary Justina, of St. Joseph’s Home in Peoria. Other vocations came out of the Mooney community which had been recognized by the pioneer priests of the 1830’s as zealous in the faith. In August 1838, Father J. J. St. Cyr, a priest of the Chicago diocese who served the scattered Catholics over a wide area of the state, wrote to his bishop: “I visited wealthy Irish families in LaSalle Prairie, amongst which families is Mr. Mooney, a rich and zealous Catholic, all from New York.” Fragments of information about early Catholics here are also contained in newspaper clippings saved over the years by Joe Carroll’s family and preserved now in a scrapbook. Here details of pioneer hardships are recorded as well as the births and deaths of family members. A walk through the Mooney cemetery calls up questions about the people buried there, although in truth the small plot seems almost to be erasing itself as gravemarkers topple and ground covers them over, all in a season. The obituaries provide the answers. Many lived to old age, including Thomas Mooney himself, who died at 90. His obituary details his own service in the War of 1812 as a member of Colonel Arcularius’ 1st regiment of troopers from the state of New York. After his arrival in Illinois, he “experienced the many vexations and hardships of a pioneer’s life… “He was followed to the grave by a long procession, among whom were his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, which made the occasion look much like a patriarch was being put to rest. The pallbearers were themselves early settlers. He was buried in the family burial lot of St. Joseph chapel, on the corner of his farm, at the ripe age of 94 years.”
The obituary writer eulogized him as a “loving husband, a strict yet kind father, generous and true in his friendships, a man without bigotry or prejudice, ever more prone to assist than to oppress his fellow man.” Others in the community did not enjoy such long lives, as the gravemarkers and obituaries record. One family lost six small children during a diptheria epidemic and one news article reveals that Maggie Allen, 24, had contract La Grippe which “developed into consumption and she gradually sank till last Monday she fell into the arms of her Savior.” Weddings in the settlement were accorded equal space in the newspapers, such society reports always including descriptions of the church (often decorated with goldenrod and other field flowers) and the dress of the bride. Families were large, according to obituaries that listed survivors, and this explains the many descendants of the Mooney settlement residents, many still living in the area. But Marcella Knight, who is a McDonnell, says that of her immediate family, “there’s nobody left but me.” The McDonnells kept faithful care of the Mooney cemetery for generations; her grandfather was so concerned, in fact, that he left funds for its upkeep in his will. This responsibility is now Marcella’s who is now a member of St. Philomena parish, Peoria, and who has a link with another early Catholic church in Edelstein. But that’s another story. Today’s visitor to the Mooney Settlement finds it windswept and chilly, the early farm houses long gone, the present farmland stretching for acres in all directions. Directly across from the Mooney graveyard, the LaSalle Prairie cemetery holds even older graves of pioneers who were here when the Indians were a threat. And just beyond the fields, just down the road toward Peoria, the sprawling acres of the very-expanding Caterpillar Tractor Company command attention, an anachronism in the old Mooney Settlement. Land in the vicinity now sells for upwards of $5,000 an acre, land for which Mooney, himself, paid $1 an acre. One hundred and sixty years have passed since that auspicious transaction in 1818. One wonders what Thomas Mooney, himself, thinks of the old place now.
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