It’s a mellow golden Saturday, the first weekend of fall, during the Stark County Fall Festival Drive in rural west-central Illinois. Chicago artist James Wisnowski and five of his students from the city have set up their easels in the softly rolling countryside just outside the town of Toulon, the seat of one of the smallest and least populated counties in the state, a region just beyond Peoria’s northwestern sprawl in which the storied Spoon River runs and enriches land checkered by — what else? — corn and soybean fields.
Yet that’s not what the artists are intent on rendering. This weekend they’re guests at the Indian Creek Vineyard Bed and Breakfast, where they’re creating watercolor landscapes laden with vineyards, which are being harvested by volunteers. Wisnowski has taught workshops in plein-air painting in the Chicago area for more than two decades and has organized sketching tours to Provence, Tuscany, Portugal, and California’s Napa and Sonoma valleys.
But Toulon? Wisnowski heard about Indian Creek when he met vineyard owners Fred and Cindy Sams at a Palatine gathering a couple of years ago and they invited him here. When a California tour fell through recently, he decided to take them up on the invitation.
“I’ve always thought of vineyards in a classically romantic way — it drives me to want to paint,” says Wisnowski. “A lot of my students can’t make a full week in Napa-Sonoma, but this is only a three-hour drive. I’ve just fallen in love with this place — I don’t have to buy a plane ticket to France. It’s beautiful.”
He adds, “There’s no reason people can’t be drawn to this. I think it’s a matter of education. People don’t know that this is out here.”
They’re starting to find out. This weekend, Indian Creek is one of six towns and two farms participating in the 70-mile Fall Festival Drive, each offering exhibits, entertainment, food, and other activities — the vineyard’s gift shop and grounds are attracting a steady trickle of visitors sampling Illinois wines, homemade pies, garden produce and crafters’ wares. The farm has been owned by Fred Sams’ family since 1841; Sams moved back, with Cindy, from northwestern Illinois in 1995 and planted grapes several years later.
The Samses are glad that Wisnowski is helping raise the fair’s profile.
“So many times, in small towns, people don’t explore the outlying areas, so you have to bring [art] to them,” says Cindy, a member of the Stark County Economic Development Committee, one of whose goals is to spark cultural opportunities. “If you’re able to do it, you need to share it. You think of the arts as being upper-echelon, but that’s not true — it goes all the way down, through every layer of society.”
Yet, she continues, “How can we get people to come without changing the reason they came for to begin with? We want to keep it the same, but we would like them to come to help our economic situation … As somebody said, ‘I hope this doesn’t turn into a Galena.'”
There’s little chance of that happening — or could it? While some visitors to Stark County will find it aptly named, others will find a land of bounty and prospect. Still, you’d have a hard time ever imagining Toulon (population 1,350) and environs overrun with tourists taking in the charmingly historic, the quaintly picturesque, the breathtakingly bucolic, festooned with strips of chain motels, fast-food joints and super-centers. This is simply land blessed with some of the best soil in the state, and the people who work it are just trying to get by. In fact, there’s not one franchise outlet in the whole county, unless you count the three Casey’s General Stores. The closest taste of mall life lies to the north, in the bustling Henry County burg of Kewanee, 15 miles from Toulon.
Page through the official 2003 Illinois Travel Guide, and Stark County barely merits a mention, save for Rock Island Trail State Park. You’d fare better perusing the latest Peoria Area Visitors Guide, which says that Stark offers a “true taste of country hospitality,” that “more than 90 percent of the county’s land is farmed” and that lawyer Abe Lincoln “made visits” to the Stark County courthouse in Toulon and is said to have had a tooth pulled at a doctor’s office, which (the office, not the tooth) has been preserved. Bradford is singled out for its crafts and antique shops. (The courthouse was built in 1856, and Lincoln spoke there two years later, about the same time as his U.S. Senate campaign debate with Stephen Douglas in nearby Galesburg. Don Schmidt, president of the Stark County Historical Society, declares there’s “absolutely no evidence” of the tooth-pulling incident.)
But Stark County, like many largely rural counties across Illinois and the heartland, has its problems — and challenges. It’s a place that has seen its population decline in every census since 1880, when it stood at 11,200; it’s now about 6,300. The richest county in the state per capita by the 1920s, according to Schmidt, Stark has seen its fortunes dwindle over the years as older folks pass away and younger ones leave to seek new horizons and career opportunities, as farms are foreclosed on and change hands, as manufacturing plants in Peoria and Galesburg shut down or bleed jobs to offshore factories. Globalism’s effects lurk.
Toulon, chartered in 1841 and named for founder William Henderson’s hometown in Tennessee, isn’t in danger of becoming a ghost town. Several boarded-up storefronts notwithstanding, Main Street appears fairly healthy, what with its one flashing yellow light and businesses that include the 100-year-old State Bank of Toulon, the Toulon Family Grocery, Connie’s Country Kitchen, the Main Street Bar and Grill and an ice cream parlor. Rural institutions are intact: There’s a soil-testing company and a grain company and a Farm Bureau office and a farm-equipment dealer and a gun dealer; there’s also a veterans’ memorial on the courthouse lawn, an American Legion, and the Toulon Women’s Club, which has been active since 1878.
Yet to call Toulon a fading farm community wouldn’t be too far off the mark. It’s easy to get a nostalgic whiff of how this place, sheltered among stands of trees that erupt from the flatland, must have been a hive of activity in decades past. Adding insult to injury, the close-knit town is still reeling from the March 2002 murders of sheriff’s deputy Adam Streicher and residents Jim and Janet Giesenhagen, victims of a shotgun rampage by Curtis Thompson, dubbed the “Bully of Toulon” in a September 2002 Chicago magazine article. (Thompson was sentenced to death in August; the sentence was automatically appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court).
In the last several years, though, a small but dedicated group of believers — longtime, new and returning residents — has banded together with the aim of putting Stark County on the map and helping ensure that Toulon won’t sink any deeper into the prairie. They want to make it an attractive place to live, work and play again. One way they’re trying to do that is gently reinventing their literal backwater as an arts-and-entertainment hub, a destination for locals and out-of-towners alike.
The man generally credited with being the linchpin is James Nowlan, a writer and “moderately Republican” rural visionary with a lengthy résumé in local, state and national politics.
Several years ago, after retiring from the University of Illinois, Nowlan returned to his native Toulon, bought a dilapidated building at 101 W. Main St. and converted it into the News Room Bistro, a 140-seat restaurant and performing-arts center. He also launched – or rather relaunched — the weekly Stark County News (“Traditional in Style, Progressive in Thought”), whose office is in the basement.
“I don’t want to suggest that simply because I’m back here things started — there have been several people in the community for years and years who’ve been concerned about economic development,” says Nowlan, 62, who remains a senior fellow with UI’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs. “But I came back with the idea of contributing something to the community. I wanted to make [the bistro] the kind of place where people can come together for meetings and for supper and for receptions and also for entertainment of various sorts … I’m hoping it encourages others to try similar ventures.”
He adds, “I mean, when we had the principal harpist and then the concertmaster of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in here for concerts, people in Toulon just couldn’t believe that. It’s just not something they expected.”
The question shouldn’t be: Will it play in Peoria? It should be: What’s playing in Toulon?
I was unaware of Toulon or Nowlan until a friend, muralist Hector Duarte, told me of his month-long visit there two summers ago: He led area teens in painting large-scale depictions of corn and other agricultural scenes on the bistro’s interior walls. I contact Nowlan, who urges me to visit during the Stark County Fall Festival Drive. He says he’ll be roaming around, reporting on Drive activities; we’ll run into each other sooner or later.
In the meantime, my partner and I follow most of the Drive’s route, which turns out to be an ideal showcase for the county’s pride of place. The event, known as the Stark County Spoon River Drive until a few years ago, has been around since 1989 and, like other festival drives in rural Illinois, functions like a vast, interknitted get-together, a county fair and a church social and a harvest fête all rolled into one, an agrarian ritual that survives in another form from a bygone era. It’s a big cash generator, too.
From Toulon (the main stop, with more than 70 vendors), we take the loop east to Wyoming (where we tank up at the Lions Club pancake breakfast in the park), then head north to Castleton (with its donations-only rummage sale) and on up to Bradford (where we pick up an official Drive yardstick), then go west and back down to Indian Creek and Toulon again. Each place has art exhibits, craft fairs, antiques and collectibles, flea markets, food booths and artisan demonstrations, plus, here and there, car shows, tractor displays, quilt raffles, clowns, pony rides and a hog-calling contest. (We didn’t make it to West Jersey or Lafayette.)
Who says there’s no “culture” in Stark County? In Wyoming, residents are working to restore the Paramount Theatre, the only movie house for miles.
There’s the award-winning Bradford Youth Center, with its many arts programs. We find a host of local handicrafters selling everything from ceramics to glassware to furniture to wood items to rugs to jewelry to birdhouses to baskets to lawn ornaments. We meet Bradford’s Avis Ditch, who keeps alive the dying art of intricately designed and crocheted doilies. And there are singers and musicians galore.
Area citizens formed the all-volunteer Stark County Arts Council 10 years ago with the aim of producing a musical at Stark County High School in Toulon. Then headed by Lynn Roark, the group hooked up with the Illinois Arts Alliance, a statewide arts-advocacy organization, which provided long-term residencies for an actor and a choreographer from Chicago. In 1994 they put on Oklahoma!, with great success, and the school has staged a musical or a drama every year since.
“Our main focus has been through the schools, but we’re always trying to expand,” says Roark, a longtime voice and piano teacher who’s still involved in what since 1998 has been called the Stark County Fine Arts Network.
Working with an annual budget of between $2,000 and $3,000 raised from donations, sponsors, and ticket sales, the network has sent students to art, music and drama camps and has awarded scholarships enabling them to take music lessons at Peoria’s Lakeview Museum. It organizes a community chorus at the Congregational Church of Toulon every Christmas and Easter. It has brought in an opera company from Western Illinois University in Macomb. It has staged a poetry contest. It runs an annual bus trip to Chicago.
Initially there were financial challenges, Roark notes, “but we’ve been able to build enthusiasm. If you have good shows and publicity, the area will support it. There’s been a lot of advancement since the beginning. If we’re interested, [the public] will be interested.”
Roark credits Nowlan with galvanizing that interest, particularly by getting the word out in the paper and not in the least by reserving Friday nights at the News Room Bistro for the area’s school-age performers. “Jim has been wonderful,” she says. “He has oodles of contacts and resources.”
The affable, down-to-earth Nowlan sits at one of the bistro’s dozen large tables, talking about Stark County’s struggles and promise. The dinner theater’s closed now, but he’d be here anyway — he lives upstairs. A founder and head of the Toulon Community Foundation, Nowlan outlines a set of economic initiatives, what he and other citizens want to do to meet the area’s needs: recruit more people to live in the county; increase job opportunities; lure light industry, as well as more small service businesses and medical professionals; and set up special programs to grow and market local produce and livestock.
To attract visitors, Nowlan says, his group and neighboring civic associations are also working with the Peoria Area Convention and Visitors Bureau to “brand the county as an entity.” Yet, he concedes, it’s been hard to get towns on the same page because of differing agendas and a resistance to change. In small rural communities, he asserts, “People who never left often don’t see the possibilities and maybe like things exactly the way they are.”
Nowlan knows Toulon — he grew up here, in a newspaper-publishing family, in the 1940s and ’50s. The weekly Stark County News was established by Nowlan’s grandfather in 1890, and when he became a state legislator in the 1930s, Nowlan’s father took over the business. In the early ’60s, while earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nowlan returned on weekends to help at the paper, but he didn’t want to run it. “I had to make my mark in the world — this town was too small,” he says. His father sold the News around 1967, and the paper folded in ’84.
Calling himself a “jack of all trades in politics and government,” Nowlan represented his home district in the Illinois House from 1968-72, served as an aide to several governors and members of the U.S. House and Senate, acted as manager for Senate and presidential campaigns (including John Anderson’s independent bid in 1980), and headed various state agencies in the 1970s and ’80s under former Governor James Thompson.
“He’s unique and iconoclastic,” says Dick Simpson, a political-science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who met Nowlan when they shared an office there in the early ’80s. Despite their different backgrounds — Simpson’s a former firebrand Chicago alderman known for reform legislation — the two are co-authoring a college textbook about power and local politics. “There’s a part of Jim that likes to get things done. He’s willing to try new projects and new ideas, and he’s willing to put in the work to have them work out.”
Nowlan has also lived in Springfield, Urbana and Galesburg, teaching political-science courses at various University of Illinois campuses and Knox College, in addition to freelancing and writing books, including Inside State Government, A New Game Plan for Illinois, and (with Samuel Gove) Illinois Politics and Government: The Expanding Metropolitan Frontier. He’s also published a novel, The Itinerant, and has another one coming out soon.
On top of his publishing and editing duties, Nowlan writes several articles and an opinion piece each week in the all-local-all-the-time Stark County News — in the Sept. 25 edition, he laments the loss of good-paying factory jobs and the need for universal health coverage.
“We’re doing it with amateurs,” he says of the paper, “and we’re learning as we go.”
The arts can help spur revitalization even in the hinterlands. Working with the Illinois Arts Alliance, Nowlan has advocated forging links among Illinois’s far-flung cultural resources and making it “one state in the arts.” He says, “If we’re going to attract families — active, upwardly mobile families — we have to show them a quality of life that is as attractive … as the one they would be leaving. There has to be a sense that there are things going on, that there are active people doing fun things, and I think the arts represent that.”
The bistro, he adds, “gives us something to trumpet to the outside world about what we are doing here, the quality of life here.” Since opening in early 2002, it has hosted such acts as the Bolshoi musicians, Opera Illinois from Peoria, the Chicago Children’s Choir, a play featuring Lincoln and U.S. Grant interpreters, and many jazz concerts, recently including the David Hoffman Quartet — Hoffman, who plays trumpet for Ray Charles, makes his home in Stark County. There are Sunday-brunch piano recitals, and there’s an art gallery in the works, too.
Saturday night at the bistro, a $15.95 ticket gets you a buffet headlined by pork chops and applesauce served up by Aunt ‘Becca, plus a show starring Peoria’s Prairie Folklore Theatre. After dinner, about 50 people settle back in their chairs to watch actress Fran Moss, storyteller Brian “Fox” Ellis, and singer/songwriter Barry Cloyd perform Prairie Fire! on the intimate stage. The two-hour play weaves traditional ballads and tales with original songs and poetry, as well as Native American lore.
The message that emerges may be relevant in these parts: That the Midwestern plains possess a stark beauty just as inspiring as van Gogh’s meadows and Monet’s ponds; that town and country, development and nature, can exist harmoniously. To many, these lands will always be a calling: Some reap crops, others sow ideas. As the players sing, “‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be …”
At least for one night, no matter where we come from, everyone belongs in
Toulon.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2003.
