~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Firstborn of Anton & Mary (Thome) Wilhelm, husband of Anna Carroll, m. abt 1916.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton Wilhelm apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan in the midst of a family crisis when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Alfred and Anna spent their entire married life between approximately 1913 and and Alfred's passing in 1957 as farmers on the same ancestral farm that Alfred's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had purchased as a young German immigrant in 1850-55. The peach trees that Nicholas had planted were still producing during Alfred and Anna's tenure on the land. They owned a collie named Laddie. Alfred was known to have stored a bushel basket of silver dollars in the attic.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney (whose story is detailed in the article below) who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister by 4 years, Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their innocent teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, for unknown reasons Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth and last child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage. Clara's father Anton died in 1931, followed by her husband Arch's premature passing in 1933, leaving her a destitute single mother with two small children and a 14 year old boy.
The unofficial "adoption" of the two girls was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters taken away from him when he was just 7 years old. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Mary, the youngest of the two girls Alfred and Anna raised, would eventually take over the farm where her mother Clara had been born, and raise her own large family there. Anna was remembered as a warm and loving grandmother to these children. Alfred died of appendicitis. Anna died in her 60's of natural causes.
The Catholic Post Sunday November 19, 1978
A Pioneer Mission Revisited - Mooney Settlement
By Albina Aspell, Catholic Post Feature Editor
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, whose 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 Mooneys 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, OByrnes, 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. Josephs 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. Edwards church in Chillicothe, and when the new St. Edwards 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. Edwards parish, Chillicothe.
Another Mooney descendant, T. Joseph Carroll, remembers many a Mass in old St. Josephs 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 Browns 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 grandfathers 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. Josephs Home in Peoria. Other vocations came out of the Mooney community which had been recognized by the pioneer priests of the 1830s 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 pioneers 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.
Firstborn of Anton & Mary (Thome) Wilhelm, husband of Anna Carroll, m. abt 1916.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton Wilhelm apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan in the midst of a family crisis when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Alfred and Anna spent their entire married life between approximately 1913 and and Alfred's passing in 1957 as farmers on the same ancestral farm that Alfred's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had purchased as a young German immigrant in 1850-55. The peach trees that Nicholas had planted were still producing during Alfred and Anna's tenure on the land. They owned a collie named Laddie. Alfred was known to have stored a bushel basket of silver dollars in the attic.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney (whose story is detailed in the article below) who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister by 4 years, Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their innocent teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, for unknown reasons Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth and last child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage. Clara's father Anton died in 1931, followed by her husband Arch's premature passing in 1933, leaving her a destitute single mother with two small children and a 14 year old boy.
The unofficial "adoption" of the two girls was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters taken away from him when he was just 7 years old. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Mary, the youngest of the two girls Alfred and Anna raised, would eventually take over the farm where her mother Clara had been born, and raise her own large family there. Anna was remembered as a warm and loving grandmother to these children. Alfred died of appendicitis. Anna died in her 60's of natural causes.
The Catholic Post Sunday November 19, 1978
A Pioneer Mission Revisited - Mooney Settlement
By Albina Aspell, Catholic Post Feature Editor
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, whose 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 Mooneys 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, OByrnes, 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. Josephs 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. Edwards church in Chillicothe, and when the new St. Edwards 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. Edwards parish, Chillicothe.
Another Mooney descendant, T. Joseph Carroll, remembers many a Mass in old St. Josephs 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 Browns 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 grandfathers 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. Josephs Home in Peoria. Other vocations came out of the Mooney community which had been recognized by the pioneer priests of the 1830s 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 pioneers 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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Firstborn of Anton & Mary (Thome) Wilhelm, husband of Anna Carroll, m. abt 1916.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton Wilhelm apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan in the midst of a family crisis when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Alfred and Anna spent their entire married life between approximately 1913 and and Alfred's passing in 1957 as farmers on the same ancestral farm that Alfred's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had purchased as a young German immigrant in 1850-55. The peach trees that Nicholas had planted were still producing during Alfred and Anna's tenure on the land. They owned a collie named Laddie. Alfred was known to have stored a bushel basket of silver dollars in the attic.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney (whose story is detailed in the article below) who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister by 4 years, Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their innocent teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, for unknown reasons Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth and last child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage. Clara's father Anton died in 1931, followed by her husband Arch's premature passing in 1933, leaving her a destitute single mother with two small children and a 14 year old boy.
The unofficial "adoption" of the two girls was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters taken away from him when he was just 7 years old. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Mary, the youngest of the two girls Alfred and Anna raised, would eventually take over the farm where her mother Clara had been born, and raise her own large family there. Anna was remembered as a warm and loving grandmother to these children. Alfred died of appendicitis. Anna died in her 60's of natural causes.
The Catholic Post Sunday November 19, 1978
A Pioneer Mission Revisited - Mooney Settlement
By Albina Aspell, Catholic Post Feature Editor
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, whose 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 Mooneys 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, OByrnes, 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. Josephs 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. Edwards church in Chillicothe, and when the new St. Edwards 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. Edwards parish, Chillicothe.
Another Mooney descendant, T. Joseph Carroll, remembers many a Mass in old St. Josephs 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 Browns 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 grandfathers 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. Josephs Home in Peoria. Other vocations came out of the Mooney community which had been recognized by the pioneer priests of the 1830s 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 pioneers 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.
Firstborn of Anton & Mary (Thome) Wilhelm, husband of Anna Carroll, m. abt 1916.
Sometime in the 1920's Anton Wilhelm apparently signed over the title to his farm to his third son Alfred and his wife Anna Carroll Wilhelm, a Mooney descendant. The couple was childless until 1925, when they took in the two eldest daughters of Alfred's sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan in the midst of a family crisis when the couple simultaneously acquired tuberculosis.
Alfred and Anna spent their entire married life between approximately 1913 and and Alfred's passing in 1957 as farmers on the same ancestral farm that Alfred's grandfather Nicholas Wilhelm had purchased as a young German immigrant in 1850-55. The peach trees that Nicholas had planted were still producing during Alfred and Anna's tenure on the land. They owned a collie named Laddie. Alfred was known to have stored a bushel basket of silver dollars in the attic.
Anna Carroll Wilhelm was a descendant of Irish immigrant Thomas Mooney (whose story is detailed in the article below) who had founded the Mooney Settlement a short distance outside of the river town of Chillicothe, Illinois. Anna had grown up on the Carroll farm just down the road from the Anton Wilhelm farm. She was the same age as Alfred Wilhelm's sister Frances Wilhelm, and gave music lessons to Frances's younger sister by 4 years, Clara. The three girls seem to have enjoyed their innocent teen years together. Frances and Anna maintained a friendship into their old ages, but Clara was largely excluded from the relationship in her adult years.
Alfred and Anna married in an unknown year prior to 1920. They had no children of their own. According to many friends and relatives who knew the couple, for unknown reasons Anna established her own separate bedroom at the Wilhelm farmhouse immediately after the honeymoon, and thus it remained for their entire marriage.
When Alfred's youngest sister Clara and her husband Arch Boylan both contracted tuberculosis while Clara was pregnant with her fifth and last child in 1925, Alfred's and Clara's father Anton Wilhelm took Clara's and Arch's 3 and 5 year old girls Mary and Marjorie, and "gave" them to Alfred and Anna for safekeeping.
By verbal contract, the arrangement was supposed to be temporary,...but Alfred and Anna coveted children. Not only did they never return the girls to Clara and Arch, but they taught them that their real mother did not truly love them. It took 40 years to even simply refute this falsehood. Of course, it was impossible to ever undo the emotional damage. Clara's father Anton died in 1931, followed by her husband Arch's premature passing in 1933, leaving her a destitute single mother with two small children and a 14 year old boy.
The unofficial "adoption" of the two girls was accomplished only with the passive aggressive complicity of Alfred and Clara's father and mother, Anton and Mary Thome Wilhelm, who could have stepped in at any point and corrected things. Instead, they chose, in explicably sadistic fashion, to watch their widowed daughter Clara mentally suffer as she watched her two girls grow up from afar, on the very farm she herself had been born and raised on, less than two miles from the small rental cottage she shared with two young children, and with her firstborn, a teenage son who had been named John "Johnny" Boylan after his grandfather. Johnny mentally suffered too, as he had had his little playmate sisters taken away from him when he was just 7 years old. When the father of all five children, Arch Boylan, died of encephalitis in August of 1933, Anna and Alfred forbade the two girls, now 11 and 13, from riding in the same funeral procession car with their mother Clara and three siblings, despite the vehement protest of their 14 year old brother Johnny, who wanted to reunite the family.
Mary, the youngest of the two girls Alfred and Anna raised, would eventually take over the farm where her mother Clara had been born, and raise her own large family there. Anna was remembered as a warm and loving grandmother to these children. Alfred died of appendicitis. Anna died in her 60's of natural causes.
The Catholic Post Sunday November 19, 1978
A Pioneer Mission Revisited - Mooney Settlement
By Albina Aspell, Catholic Post Feature Editor
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, whose 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 Mooneys 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, OByrnes, 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. Josephs 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. Edwards church in Chillicothe, and when the new St. Edwards 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. Edwards parish, Chillicothe.
Another Mooney descendant, T. Joseph Carroll, remembers many a Mass in old St. Josephs 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 Browns 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 grandfathers 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. Josephs Home in Peoria. Other vocations came out of the Mooney community which had been recognized by the pioneer priests of the 1830s 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 pioneers 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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