Welcome Home: Moving from a Strong City to a Strong Town
“In a place like Princeton...the choices are more personal. Most people here have known each other for generations. The problem solvers are likely to be somebody’s relatives. Or former classmates. ”
Downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Source: Pixabay.
Five years ago my wife Sarah and I decided we would leave Madison, Wisconsin to live in her hometown of Princeton, Illinois. Several of our acquaintances wondered why we would move away “to the middle of nowhere.” The truth is, our choice was to move to somewhere.
The tale of these two cities is rich with irony, with surprises and also with exactly what we expected. In many ways it illustrates the key messages of the Strong Towns movement.
First, Madison, with its spectacular farmers’ markets, Big Ten sports, the State Capitol and the University of Wisconsin. Downtown Madison is teeming with opera, symphonies, choirs and theaters, museums, street performers and more popular music and alcohol than a healthy human being should probably ever consume. On any given Friday or Saturday night there are hundreds of entertainment options. The intellectual, cultural and political overload can be overwhelming. That’s probably why hundreds of thousands of UW alumni have passed through four years or more on campus, then moved on, remembering the city with great fondness. They could come back to a sea of Badger red on football weekends, drink great local brews and see old friends. What a place!
Madison’s parks and bike paths are the envy of urban planners. But downtown streets through the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona have become a nightmare, and the beltline traffic on the outskirts of the city is no better. A recent headline: “Madison City Council Passes $40 Wheel Tax to Close Major Budget Hole.”
City and state politics are exhausting. In a city of strong neighborhoods and an increasingly diverse population, it seems like anything important takes forever to pass muster. Property taxes and the price of housing are often double what they are in rural Illinois.
For 25 years I was mostly happy to represent the University’s commitment to “The Wisconsin Idea” of serving the people of the state through applied education and social capital. Colleagues and I helped start the Dane Buy Local initiative, Dane County TimeBank, Community Food and Gardening Network and Little Free Library movement. All of those innovations, by the way, share practices often found in strong rural communities.
Our family loved Madison, especially the neighborhood where our kids grew up. Sitting on the front porch of our little bungalow every summer, we watched parents pushing strollers along the sidewalk and walking their dogs. We knew just about everybody and they knew us. Potlucks, picnics and block parties were all part of the picture.
But it wasn’t quite the same as Sarah’s hometown.
Princeton is a farming community of 7,600 off Exit 56 of Interstate 80, marked by four giant “Flags of Freedom.” Surrounded by soybeans and corn, Princeton is at the western reaches of what is now promoted as “Starved Rock Country.” The name makes sense, because the Starved Rock State Park attracts nearly three million visitors a year, most of whom come from within two to three hours away. Small cities and towns like Princeton—Ottawa, LaSalle, Oglesby, Peru, Mendota, Streator—can attract their share of those three million.
After centuries of going it alone, many of those communities are beginning to see their common interests. While they definitely want to see short-term visitors, they also are in the business of calling their wandering families and careerists back home to stay.
Homestead Festival (Princeton, Illinois). Image via Wikimedia Commons.
So far, the harvest of retirees is pretty good. The slower pace of life, lower home prices, and reasonable cost of living are beginning to appeal to younger generations as well.
The results of larger scale economic development efforts, however, are mixed. Few big employers are interested, and quite a few have come and gone in the past several decades.
Princeton is but one example of these nationwide trends. A quick review of the twice-weekly Bureau County Republican newspaper includes dozens of fundraisers, celebrations and civic events—far more than even the most active citizens can attend or support. Service clubs and churches, nonprofits and community groups struggle to keep pace with unmet needs beyond the reach of city government.
With more than 350 members, the Princeton Chamber of Commerce has helped generate a Main Street full of energy. New locally owned businesses seem to open almost every month. This year’s surge in women’s clothing stores is making it easier to conduct joint marketing campaigns in regional media.
Recently established City commissions coordinate Historic Preservation, Bicycle and Pedestrian issues and Public Arts. The traditional County Fair, annual Z Tour Bike Ride, and the grand old lady of Princeton events, the Homestead Festival, bring tens of thousands of people home to class reunions, pork burgers, car shows, street concerts, barbeque contests and tractor pulls. As early as Thursday afternoon before the Saturday Homestead parade, Main street is lined with lawn chairs to reserve the prime spots for watching more than 200 floats, marching bands, tractors, fire engines and horses pass by.
Downtown Princeton, Illinois. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
If experts on asset-based community development were asked to identify resources for the town’s vitality, they would list the local Ace Hardware store, public library and several Main street retailers such Hoffman’s Patterns of the Past, a china shop known throughout the country. Big employers like the city-owned hospital, an Ace distribution center and several light manufacturing plants play their part, as do employers within a 40- to 50-mile radius.
Surely the service clubs and nonprofit board members and “many hands make light work” brigades would also make the list. Towns like Princeton survive—and sometimes thrive—because of their year-round efforts.
But is that all enough?
The recent defeat of a referendum to build new elementary and middle schools brought strong emotions to the surface in social media. The prospect of higher taxes and a feeling of powerlessness among lower and fixed income residents resulted in resistance. Despite an active alliance to prevent alcohol and drug abuse, problems with opioids have not escaped Bureau County. Facebook debates about cannabis dispensaries focus on the balance between generating more tax revenue and what many residents believe will be yet another ripple effect of the perils of big city life.
Just about everyone agreed that the county jail is full and falling apart, so the run up to the same election day brought a solution: buy the ten year-old newspaper building for half price and make it a jail with many more cells. Raise taxes.
Challenges to Princeton are definitely not over. The Walmart Super Center next to the Interstate is reducing its work force even though it already sells more food, pharmaceuticals and other goods than all of its local competitors combined. The city-owned Perry Memorial Hospital is exploring its options with OSF, a major regional healthcare provider which already includes 13 hospitals and 124 locations of its own. The municipal electrical plant is generously welcoming installers of solar panels. The beautiful Princeton Water plant, which critics call “our Taj Mahal,” stands ready to handle far beyond its current load of water users.
Major good news, often forgotten by anti-tax advocates, is that the City’s debt has been reduced from around $40 million to under $30 million in the past several years.
But…seven inches of rain in one day this summer overloaded the century-old sewer system and hundreds of home basements were flooded with storm water or sewage. Ongoing Facebook arguments erupted yet again. How could this happen when the City just spent millions of dollars to replace the sewers? How are we going to pay for our health care, and our firefighters’ and police officers’ pensions? What are we going to do to provide better housing for minimum wage earners and people on fixed incomes? How long will it take to replace the hundreds of jobs we lost when the last big factory here closed? Will we ever recover from the closing of the steel mill in nearby Hennepin?
Had those problems come up in “big city” Madison, proposed answers probably would include many alternatives carried out by government agencies or big employers. In a place like Princeton, however, the choices are more personal. Most people here have known each other for generations. The problem solvers are likely to be somebody’s relatives. Or former classmates.
“Strong ties make strong towns.”
Why would we move from Madison to here? Because my wife and her eight brothers and sisters, parents, uncles and aunts and grandparents grew up here. Three brothers still live and work here. Several generations of men and women were board members, church and civic leaders and behind-the-scenes caregivers for their neighbors. Strong ties make strong towns.
We live in a house built in 1848, so the solar panels coming this winter will be carefully placed on the garage, out of the view of the heavy commuter traffic—maybe 20 or 30 cars and pickups from Tiskilwa every weekday morning. We can see 360 degrees of sunrises and sunsets.
Instead of thinking of this town as “the middle of nowhere,” we are more likely to see it as the center of everything. From our old farm house it takes about seven minutes to downtown…on a bicycle. But there is much too much to do when we get there.
Welcome home.
Top photo of the Homestead Festival parade by David Wilson.
About the Author
Rick Brooks co-founded the Little Free Library movement before retiring from 25 years as an outreach program manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also co-founded Dane Buy Local, Wisconsin's largest local independent business alliance, and founded or led non-profits in small business development, sustainable agriculture, public health, grassroots community development, international development, microfinance and journalism. He now runs Midwest Partners, a civic affairs organization in North Central Illinois. You can connect with Rick on LinkedIn.