Son expands family's Mount Prospect business empire
John Philip Moehling is an example of how the generation which followed the founders of Mount Prospect generally took up the cause of developing and improving the village as their parents had.
The only surviving son of shopkeeper/postmaster/depot master John Conrad Moehling and his wife, Emelia Bahr, was born on his parents' 100-acre farm, south of the tracks.
John P. was 7 when his father chose to give up farming and buy the general store next to the railroad tracks.
Imagine how exciting that move must have been for John P. He went from only having farm activities to keep him amused to being able to help in a bustling store/post office and watch for trains to pass by.
He lived on the second floor, moving a few doors away when his parents built an elaborate Victorian home at 8 Northwest Highway.
When he came of age, John P. expanded his father's business, becoming the agent for International Harvester's Deering Division in all of northern Illinois and Wisconsin. He sold farm machinery such as plows and seeders and traveled to farms all over the region to set them up.
On June 11, 1903, he married Maria Kirchoff of Arlington Heights in one of the most lavish weddings the area had ever known. A thousand guests were invited, and the Chicago media reported on the soiree. The couple eventually had nine children (six of whom survived).
John P. graduated from Bryant Strattons Business College, and then, in 1908, the Chicago Correspondence School of Law.
By the time Mount Prospect was incorporated in 1917, his father was ready to retire. John P. took over the businesses and added more. He was adept at noticing trends and seizing upon them to build his local empire.
In 1924, he gave up the farm machinery business and, in 1927, opened a real estate and insurance brokerage called the John P. Moehling Co.
Four years after that, he opened the community's first gasoline service station at the corner of Northwest Highway and Main Street. It was the height of style at the time, with two service bays and four ornamental pumps with glass crowns on top. He had his son, Edwin, manage the bustling business.
When central heating became popular, John P. opened a heating business, selling and installing Caloric Pipeless Furnaces. In 1941, he built a store at 117 S. Main St. to attract the National Tea Co. to Mount Prospect. The Ben Franklin store later leased that same building.
Civic-minded to the core, John P. served at various times as a commissioner for the Weller Creek Drainage District, as the secretary of the Mount Prospect Township School Board, as the village's first police magistrate and as village collector, a job he took just in time for the Great Depression.
And, in 1934, he joined with other local men to form a Lions Club chapter.
Maria died in 1938 at the age of 53, while John P. died nine years later at the age of 72 from cancer, leaving behind an enviable legacy of progress in his hometown.