A lot of folks are watching with trepidation as the Trump administration gets ready to take—and I do mean “take”—office. Although losing the popular vote by a historic margin for a Presidential candidate, Trump will assume the office of President Jan. 20. After which, those of us who’ve seen a thing or two and know a thing or two will not at all be surprised if the new administration becomes one of the most corrupt in the nation’s history.
Given the President-elect’s near complete ignorance of the nation’s history, the Constitution, and how representative government works; his disdain for public ethics and morals, not to mention the nation’s democratic traditions; and his seeming ignorance of most civilized norms, it will be a miracle if corruption doesn’t become a Trump Administration byword. After all, he will have violated the Constitution as soon as he takes the oath of office, so it’s unlikely he and his minions will have much more respect for it.
The U.S. has experienced lawless times in the past, of course, sometimes starting right at the top. While U.S. Grant was an excellent general, his political skills were lacking, and he managed to pick a cabinet that was closer to a gang of thieves. Same with Warren G. Harding.
But government lawlessness is one thing, public lawlessness is another. And after World War I ended, the nation entered a protracted era of ever-increasing criminal violence. Economics were part of the problem, and so was the nation’s experiment with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. By November 1920, folks in northern Illinois were becoming ever more concerned about the crime wave that was sweeping the region.
In the Nov. 17 Kendall County Record, editor Hugh Marshall wrote: “Plainfield had a bank robbery, Newark suffered from burglars, Somonauk had an attack on its bank, auto robbers and bandits work unhampered, mail trains are held up and criminals of the worst sort are abroad in the state. There is no organized method of apprehending them. The officials in the small towns are not competent to wrestle with the question of a robbery. A state constabulary would be able to throw out a cordon within a few minutes after a robbery and the criminals would be apprehended or killed.”
Such concerns were the genesis for the formation of the he Illinois State Police, which was established in 1922. But even after the troopers were activated, fast cars, paved roads, and criminals who had received automatic weapons training during World War I gave bank-robbing criminal gangs a definite advantage over anything the authorities could do. At least at first.
That those worries were not overblown was illustrated by the raid on the Farmers State Bank of Millbrook in October 1929.
The historic old Millbrook Bridge was built on the old ford across the Fox River in 1897, and at least for the present is still standing although it’s been bypassed with a change in road configuration and a new bridge.
The rural hamlet of Millbrook, located in Kendall County’s Fox Township, was settled in 1835. By 1837, families had arrived and the small community began growing. That year, Mrs. Rachel Blanding, on a tour of the west with her ailing husband, visited the Rev. Royal Bullard and William Vernon, both of whom lived in the tiny but growing community. Mrs. Blanding named Bullard’s farm Millbrook, and the name soon became applied to the entire small community.
The village itself wasn’t formally platted until the mid-1850s. Jacob Budd, born near Fishkill, New York, Nov. 11, 1811, emigrated to Kendall County in the summer of 1850, opening a store at Newark. Then in 1855, he moved to 250 acres of land in Fox Township, where he quickly became a leading citizen. Budd platted the town of Millbrook in the mid-1850s, building a store there. In 1866 when the old Mansfield Post Office was discontinued and moved to Millbrook, he became the first postmaster. And then when the Ottawa, Oswego and Fox River Valley Rail Road was built from Streator to Ottawa and then up the Fox River Valley through Yorkville and Oswego to Geneva, the tracks passed through Millbrook, giving the small town a boost. Budd added a grain elevator, a hotel, a lumberyard to his operations and eventually a creamery and other businesses were added, including sometime before November 1912, a bank.
In the early morning hours of Nov. 26, 1912, Charles Stuppy and John Clint used a charge of nitroglycerine to blow the bank safe open. The pair were convicted of bank robbery in January 1914 after a lengthy legal process and sent to prison.
Stuppy, though defeated was apparently unbowed, and in October 1920 he was arrested again for bank robbery, this time of the Newark Farmers State Bank.
The robberies continued of small country banks, as well as those in larger communities despite growing efforts to halt the crime wave. And then on Oct. 29, 1929 came the most brazen robbery ever of a Kendall County community.
The village of Millbrook as it was mapped for George A. Ogle & Company’s 1922 Kendall County Atlas, just seven years before a large gang of bank thieves took the town over while they robbed the community’s bank.
The well-armed gang cut the telephone lines leading into Millbrook, and then sealed off the village’s streets leading out of town, patrolling to make sure nobody escaped to raise the alarm.
Meanwhile another group broke into the bank building and blew the safe. As the Kendall County Record noted the next day, while well organized, the gang wasn’t especially skilled in blowing bank vaults: “…they were inadept enough to use ten shots of ‘nitro’ to break open the vault.” In fact, the explosions of the badly placed nitroglycerine reportedly demolished the bank building.
After collecting the loot, the gang left in a cloud of dust, never to be seen again.
While the county had experienced bank robberies before, and was destined to experience a lot more of them as time passed, this was the only time such a large and well-armed gang was able to take over an entire county town.
Record editor Marshall was alarmed at the brazen act: “The residents of Millbrook experienced the sensation of being forced into submission last Tuesday morning when their bank was looted,” Marshall wrote. “A similar circumstance may be enacted in any of our towns at any time. The affair at Millbrook should demonstrate how powerless we are against an organized band of criminals. We do not know how they were armed, but suppose they had machine guns? If some gentleman in Millbrook had been so foolhardy as to attempt to stop these marauders, he would have had his home shot to pieces.
Eventually, the banks and the communities in which they were located got better organized, with the Illinois Bankers’ Association going so far as to help banks hire a private guard force. But small, isolated rural banks like the one in Millbrook, remained vulnerable. And, indeed, the Millbrook bank was robbed again in February 1931 and yet again in July 1933. But with the last robbery, the county had become much better organized and determined. Two of the three thieves were chased and run to ground near Sugar Grove by a 500-man posse of Kendall County farmers, while the third was shot dead while trying to steal a car at Cross Lutheran Church during services on the following Sunday morning.
All of which goes to show, they didn’t call that era the “Roaring ‘20s” for nothing, even here in normally sedate, rural Kendall County.
historyonthefox 