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Kitchen Table Colloquies

Neighbors chat about saving the Sangamon basin

Illinois Times

June 13, 1980

A report on a sort of pre-planning conference intended to cement if not create communities of interest who together might improve prospects for all creatures living in the basin of central Illinois’s Sangamon River, from mushrooms to millionaires. The raised consciousness and facilitated feedback that was the hoped-for end of the process begun on this day never happened. It remains sadly true, as one participant said, that few people who live in the Sangamon basin even know they live in the Sangamon basin, and it’s hard to get folks to care about a place they’re never heard of.

 

I had taken my preferred place near a rear exit at Sangamon State University's Brookens Auditorium, a seat strategically situated for the beating of speedy but graceful retreats. One learns to anticipate the floods of boredom that so often engulf par­ticipants at such meetings and take steps; in any hall, after all, the rear seats occupy the highest ground.

 

The occasion, I should explain, was the concluding session of the day-long conference held in May to kick off SSU's three-year Sangamon River Basin Project. The project is a com­plex and ambitious undertaking to engage the residents of a ten-county central Illinois region in what organizers have described as a "grand debate" over the future of the river basin, with attention paid to the con­flicts between farmer and en­vironmentalist, between farmer and coal miner, between developer and preservationist, between city and small town which will have reshaped the basin by the year 2000.

 

Presided over by faculty brought to SSU ex­pressly for the purpose, the project will not be merely another academic excursion. Rather it will be a com­munity—treacherous word—explora­tion of alternatives through a process designed to be self-defining, inclusive, adaptive. The opening conference, then, was a chance for some of these citizens to meet, learn more about the project (and perhaps just as impor­tant, let the project learn more about them) as the two groups began to discover (in the words of SSU presi­dent Alex Lacy) "where we want to go together in the future."

 

The morning had been devoted to speeches and panel discussions, a pig roast, and a miniature arts festival. The crowd was congenial, skeptical, and a little confused; said one partici­pant as she sat waiting for the concluding What-Does-It-All-Mean ses­sion to begin, "This is very, very amorphous." In my notes an entry reads simply, "Community?" Before the participants unravel the future there are some tricky problems in the present to solve. I wondered whether the planners hadn't devised a mechanism for this citizens' inquiry and missed providing them a motive.

 

There is no real Sangamon River community, only a collection of civil, economic, and historical communities which overlap the river basin. This absence of a shared set of identifica­tions and assumptions, of a shared fate will be vital to the project. Miss­ing it in nature, the project staff will have to help create it.

 

It was doubly interesting, therefore, to study the kinds of people the conference attracted. They are the future's constituency hereabouts, good people, but as different from the average as intelligence, education, and commitment have always made peo­ple like them. The talk that day had had a distinctly organic/solar/wilderness/preservationist/conservationist accent; even the pig which was served for lunch had been reared on a nonchemical diet. An outing had been planned for that weekend, a canoe trip down the Sangamon led by local Sierra Club­bers. I had no way of knowing, but I would have bet a bowl of The Den's best that at no time during the plan­ning had it been seriously proposed to rent a bus for a day's sightseeing and souvenir-buying. I have nothing against canoe trips, mind you. It's just that the conference was designed to attract "all of the citizens of the Sangamon River basin" (their italics). The Redbirds get that kind of broad-based crowd, and they don't do it by offering sherry at the beer counter.

 

As the convenors trickled in from lunch, there was much casual chitchat about windmills in Chicago Heights and demonstration farms; noted one gentleman, "Fertilizer companies are like automakers with their big cars—they're going to die hard." There was some impatience expressed by attendees who found some of the planners' rhetoric—chock full as it was of feedbacks and focuses and scenarios, generating concepts here and facilitating there "outside the normal band of individualistic and vocal at­titudes"—impenetrable.

 

The language, Venus-like, offered deceptively smooth surfaces. At one of the morning sessions someone had warned against the trap of pushing SSU's values as "standard," and the fact was that the project was in its most basic sense at odds with much of the region's people who have organized their world in terms of interstates and county lines; to them, the concept of the river basin as an ecological entity was alien. One of the planners told a reporter that citizens would have to undergo "intellectual conditioning" before they can first appreciate and then subvert the forces conquering the valley. How much was made clear by Brad Taylor, the ex-director of the Sangamon County planning commission, who pointed out that most people in the study area don't even know they're in the Sangamon River basin.

 

The conference chairman was Michael Scully, the articulate banker-cum-organic farmer from Buffalo who, as someone who lives outside the normal band of attitudes, was perhaps the inevitable person to chair the effort. Scully likened the project to a relay race in which people would carry on until they tired, then pass the work on to someone fresher, until together they would cover the distance. It struck me as I listened that it is also typical of a farmer to see a harvest where everybody else sees only mud.

 

Scully and I had had a chance to talk a bit the previous evening at a reception at Lacy's house. The con­versation ranged from our mutual hopes for the project to sandboxes and the matter of country living. We had each from our own perspective viewed with alarm the hemorrhage of people from the rural districts, though in my case the relevant statistic is the fact that since the Depression the migration of Americans from country to city has surpassed in numbers the whole of the European immigrations between 1820 and 1920, while for Scully it is the fact that his family's land near Buffalo which used to support nineteen families, now is home to on­ly five.

 

Scully offered some reasons for the exodus. Fewer and fewer people are willing to work hard enough to be a farmer these days, he noted. Indeed, town folk are not fit for farm work. Moreover, even those who are fit find it increasingly distasteful; farmers have found they can make a living from air-conditioned tractor cabs which differ only in their mobility to an accountant's desk, and so have given up raising livestock because animals are irremediably messy; only a millionaire would enjoy mucking about in the pig shed, as Scully does, because he finds it good exercise.

 

Then there is the isolation. Most people can't take it, and there is evidence that many of those who had to endure it could not either; Scully notes admiringly that his wife sur­vives because she is a country girl who was bred to it. Isolation begets boredom; William Cobbett, the nine­teenth-century English countryman-journalist, observed, "In towns, or large villages, people make a shift to find the means of rubbing the rust off from each other by a vast variety of sources of contest. But in the country, there is, alas! no such resource. Here they are so placed as to prevent the possibility of such lucky local contact. Here, therefore . . . all circumstances seem calculated to cause never-ceasing con­cord with its accompanying dullness."

 

There are hints of a return to the country by unhappy urban ex­patriates, but it won't last. The conti­nuing aggregation of humans in cities which began 6,000 years ago is a more convincing statement about the rigors of the country life than any modern manifesto. What kept people in the country was the fact that, in the cruder economies of the past, most of those who wished to eat had to grow the food themselves. While some city slickers take to wearing overalls, farmers strive to shed theirs. Farmers increasingly seem to be in the country but less and less of the country. I take it to be significant that the win­nings spreads in a recent farm bureau "Farm Beautification" contest had nothing remotely farmlike about them, but were instead precise copies of suburban ranch houses. It is a mark of pride among many farmers that one can't tell them from town folks anymore.

 

It did not occur to me until several days later that the modest colloquy between Scully and me was precisely the sort of thing the Sangamon basin project is intended to stimulate. It re­mains to be seen whether the par­ticular institutional arrangements are best to weave the scattered strands of the region's thought; during the con­ference I made a note to the effect that a kitchen table might be a better venue for these discussions than a college. But where doesn't matter much so long as the discussions hap­pen. As project planners have noted, "Existing trends promise little more than a continuation of the scattered growth which is neither economically sound, nor environmentally wise, with regard to the resources which belong to us all." ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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