Then & Now: Folkers Hotel - Frankfort

Snapshots and postcard photographs of small-town scenes taken in the early 20th century help to provide an image of small-town America and give a unique perspective on the character of the rural life of its residents.

Images of Main Street, with its opera house, bank, saloons, barbershop, lodge hall, courthouse, railroad depot and hotel, also help to portray a strong sense of community before the automobile.

Most of America’s small towns originally were plotted in response to early 19th century railroad construction. A town’s Main Street either paralleled the railroad tracks or crossed the tracks on the perpendicular.

Hotels of the railroad era, in both rural and urban areas, often were located in business districts close to, but also distanced from, the noise and pollution of the railroad.

Through much of the 19th century, most small-town hotels were integrated physically into downtown “blocks.”

These hotels were often housed in a single building and provided a variety of functions: lodge halls, “opera houses,” restaurants, bakeries, banks or retail stores. These integrated business blocks with hotel facilities typified Main Street America’s Gilded Age of the 19th century.

Small-town hotels thrived, as did the towns themselves, by competing with each other. Some hotels were enlarged and others were replaced entirely by a new structure over time.

With the arrival of the automobile, the landscape of the small town changed. Main Street, which traditionally functioned as a large place for pedestrians and wagons, now solely became a space for automobiles. In time, this new mode of transportation would pull business and other activities farther away from the original city center, including hotels.

A variety of these early hotels still can be seen along the main streets of towns throughout Illinois, including Frankfort.

Located on the southeast corner of Kansas and Hickory streets, the Folkers Hotel was owned and operated for many years by Johnson Folkers, a German immigrant who settled in the Mokena area around 1850. Eventually, his three sons, William, Frank and Peter, would take over ownership of the hotel.

A partnership formed by these three brothers, known as Folkers Brothers, carried on numerous businesses begun by Johnson that were important to the growth of Frankfort, including a livery stable, a slaughter house and construction for the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern railroad near town.

The first successful business of this partnership was the meat market, which the three brothers purchased from their father. A brick building was erected next to the hotel to provide storage and support for the meat market concern.

In addition to the hotel and meat business, in the first decade of the 20th century, Frank Folkers constructed lines for the Interstate Telephone Co. in Frankfort, Green Garden, Monee and Peotone townships.

Once completed, the Folkers Brothers operated a central exchange on the second floor of the hotel. In time, the Illinois Bell Telephone Co. acquired the Interstate Co., and Folkers helped to build the Bell Telephone Co.’s additional trunk lines between Joliet and Chicago Heights.

The Then and Now pictures show Kansas Street looking east from Hickory Street. Folkers Hotel is the two-story building on the right in both photographs.

Further down the block on the right, the two-story brick building was home to a butcher shop and the Exchange Bank. On the north side of the street, visible in the Then photograph, the old post office, drug store and grocery store buildings are visible.