Compared to its neighbors, the old guard shack at Heritage Village in Lockport is relatively modern.
Built around 1920, it was outfitted with electricity and running water when it was moved from the old Texaco refinery across the canal, where it had long been a payroll and security office.
For generations of workers from Lockport, Lemont, Joliet and towns further afield, the building meant a daily stop and a weekly reward, according to Sandy Vasko, director of the Will County Historical Museum and Research Center, which administers Heritage Village.
“There are so many people who have a great fondness for that building,” she said. “Texaco employed a lot of people. They had highly educated chemists and people who were just laborers, but that’s where everyone went to get their paycheck. It also was the guard shack. You could not come in to Texaco without passing that guard shack and getting the OK to come in. Everyone who went in there or out of there or got paid by them, they knew that building.”
Texaco started refining oil on the site between the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the old Illinois and Michigan Canal around 1911, churning out fuel as demand grew for increasingly popular motorcars, and, when World War II started, fighter planes.
As the era of gas-guzzling vehicles drew to a close, the refinery shut down in 1981 and was gradually dismantled, becoming mostly a squat white forest of giant fuel tanks by the time Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000.
Chevron removed the tanks and began a cleanup of the property, and “we were given the building,” Vasko said. “It was almost the last thing they did before they said they were finished.”
Besides its plethora of doors — one side has three and there are six altogether — the building is rather unremarkable.
But it was one of the last vestiges of what was once the city’s largest employer, and the museum was glad to add the structure to its collection of Will County buildings that had been saved from demolition.
Chevron trucked the guard shack down the west side of the canal to a bridge that could accommodate its girth and then placed it atop a newly poured concrete foundation. Installed about 6 years ago, it was the newest arrival to Heritage Village, joining such structures as an 1856 one-room school house brought in from Homer Glen and Mokena’s original wooden two-cell jailhouse.
It’s also the newest building there in a historical sense. As such, it’s the only building they could outfit with modern fixtures without altering authenticity.
“We decided to use it as our visitors center,” Vasko said. “And also as a shelter from storms, heat when you’re cold and cooling when you’re hot. There’s a real bathroom for people who don’t want to use those green monsters out there.”
With modern conveniences come modern problems. Vasko found that out last week when she got a call from the city asking about massive water use at the site. She wrapped up her shift at the history museum and headed over to Heritage Village, where a compression valve had broken from a water heater and “water was running through our meter and onto the floor freely.”
What’s more, it may have been doing so for as long as three weeks. Nobody had been inside since mid-January, and the water was flowing out under the doors on the backside of the building, where nobody noticed the “three waterfalls.”
Luckily, the epoxy sealed concrete floor was undamaged. But, Vasko said, “condensation happened.”
“The whole entire inside of the building was wet. Ever surface — horizontal, vertical — was wet. Every piece of paper was soaked and there was brilliant pink mold and gray mold growing on everything. Even the money in the donation box turned pink and gray.”
Heritage Village is always open, but the buildings aren’t publicly accessible until they can be staffed by volunteers starting in May. At that point, the plan was to welcome visitors to the visitors center with an exhibit about the Texaco plant and its impact on the region.
Many of the documents that were to be used in the exhibit were “turned to trash,” along with some photographs and other items. Part of the display included old toy trucks bearing the Texaco logo, still in their original packaging.
“The toys seem to be OK, but the boxes just melted away,” Vasko said.
But the main damage was to the drywall, much of which “turned to mush” and will have to be replaced.
It was pretty bad, but Vasko has seen worse threats to Heritage Village. Vandals went on a window breaking spree there in 2018. And in 2010, the village nearly ceased to exist after it was relocated from its former spot downtown where Lockport’s Lincoln Landing now is. The museum lost its funding and a dispute arose about rented steel footings supporting the historic buildings while they awaited a new home.
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“We might have gone under,” Vasko said. “But a bunch of us who had been associated with the museum for 25 years or more said we’re not going to let this go. So we all became volunteers.
“I’ve been director for 12 years, and I’m a volunteer. I don’t get paid. And every single person at that museum is a volunteer. The person who puts up exhibits, cleans the place, gives tours, does data entry, all are volunteers.”
They settled the dispute and purchased the steel foundations. And with an assist from the city, they received a “swampy piece of land the Park District owned but couldn’t do anything with” along the I&M Canal, where a volunteer architect designed a “little stream that runs through the village,” Vasko said.
“There are bridges over it, but it’s actually a bioswale that takes the standing water out and puts it into the canal,” she said.
Donations and volunteers helped put the historic buildings on raised foundations and complete the work needed to get Heritage Village back in business.
“I believe that village represents over $350,000 in time and physical donations,” Vasko said. “I’m really proud of it. All those people knew we were in dire straits, and they all knew what we were trying to do was worthy of their time and effort.”
And it has been worth it, Vasko said.
“People just love the village. You’ll see lovers walking through, kids playing in the creek, people having lunch there,” she said.
A recent Eagle Scout project installed QR code placards on the buildings leading to online videos about the history of each.
“We call it our outdoor museum,” Vasko said, where they try to tell the story of Will County, from early resettlement days through a Medicine Wheel Garden established by the Lockport-based Native American group Midwest SOARRING to an 1863 farmhouse imported from Crest Hill and the old Wabash Railroad Depot that once served Symerton.
“It’s a little different take on history,” she said. “It’s a place where you’re not reading things on the wall — the village is a place where you experience things around you. You can touch almost everything there. It’s immersing people.”
Vasko’s favorite structure is the Mokena pokey. It was built in 1881 for $125 and was known then as a calaboose.
“It’s the littlest building, but it has the most stories, if we only knew them,” she said.
The building is two cells facing opposite ends with 4-inch thick wooden walls that were heated by potbellied stoves. Platforms anchored to the walls with chains served as beds.
The calaboose was simply a holding pen for those awaiting a trip to a more formal lockup in Joliet, or where drunks could sleep it off, Vasko said, though it got some very different residents in its next incarnation.
“When it stopped being a jail, a man moved it and moved into it,” Vasko said. “He lived on one side and on the other side he kept his chickens. After he died, it was in wrack and ruin, and that’s when (museum) members heard of it and decided they wanted to rescue it. And we did.”
It’s that kind of can-do spirit that has Vasko confident Heritage Village will overcome its latest setback in time for the summer season when they hope to have all the buildings open and staffed by volunteers the first weekend of each month starting in May.
When word spread about the water heater mishap, “immediately people wanted to go in there and start cleaning up,” she said, though she’s been hesitant so far to take them up on their offers because it’s a small building and there is mold involved.
“Once we get to where we know what has been destroyed and what our needs are, I suspect people will step up,” she said.
It’s also another reminder that preservation of any structure is never guaranteed.
“These buildings are fragile, so we urge people to come see them now,” she said. “Because you do not know when the next tornado may remove them.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].