The story of the village of Antioch is in some ways a modern fairy tale.
She is a sleeping beauty who suddenly has been awakened by the kiss of modern developers.
Or she is a Cinderella, a simple rustic belle, clearly going to the ball but wondering how much of her virtue she`ll be able to keep on the way?
For far longer than its neighbors in the corridor of growth near the Tri- State Tollway, this village of fewer than 6,000 people has remained a time-passed retreat of gently rolling farmland and sparkling wetlands,
occasionally punctuated by horse farms and evergreen nurseries.
This peace and quiet continued into the late 1980s, but it has become evident that there is no real way for Antioch to avoid becoming part of the expanding Chicago/Milwaukee megalopolis.
There are, to be sure, those who express themselves as if growth already is blighting the landscape.
”Antioch growth to date has not been planned and has not been quality,” said one resident of the area, who moved here for the quiet pleasures of country life. ”They`re jammin` it in there. It increases your taxes enormously.
”Gurnee`s a beautiful example,” he said. ”It is like the killer bees flying north; now we`ve got killer development. They`re now at the gates of Antioch and are stinging us.”
As the surrounding towns and villages have become warrens of tightly packed housing, shopping malls and industrial parks, Don Davis, the community development director, acknowledges that ”the village has become more antigrowth in the last year. We went from little growth to a large amount of growth. We are controlling our standards.”
Said the mayor, Robert C. Wilton: Antioch wants ”to be different by our controlled quality growth, in order to ensure Antioch`s residents all the advantages of a small country town and two great metropolitan areas.”
This beautiful land was inhabited by the Potawatomi Indian tribe when the white settlers began to arrive. Winding Illinois Highway 173 was once an Indian trail; so was Illinois Highway 83, known as the Muquonago Trail. And Sequoit, the name of the local creek curling through the countryside, is an Indian word meaning ”winding.”
The Potawatomis were a nomadic Algonguian-speaking tribe who lived in wigwams. They hunted deer and fished for their food. After the conquest of the Illinois Indians about 1765, they took possession of most of what is now the northern part of Illinois.
In July 1812, Indian camps along the Fox River were in constant ferment with war dances, as the Potawatomis sided with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812. Although a few dissidents formed raiding parties and pillaged and took hostages, most of the Potawatomis were loyal to the American settlers in the Blackhawk War of 1832.
After 1832, the Indians began to leave the area, retiring beyond the Mississippi, as the first permanent white settlers began to arrive in numbers and settle along Sequoit Creek.
In 1839 Hiram Buttrick built a sawmill along the same creek, which made Antioch a center of commerce. (A replica of the mill was built in 1976, a few hundred feet downstream from where it once stood.) In 1843 the residents gave the settlement the biblical name Antioch, after an ancient Assyrian town that based its laws on respect for humanity and history.
The town grew as new settlers, primarily of English and German descent, established farms and businesses. In the late 1800s, Antioch became a popular vacation spot for Chicagoans, and tourism grew quickly once a rail line to Chicago was laid in 1886.
In 1892, Wilton said proudly, the first minutes of the village were recorded.
”Thomas Wilton, my great-grandfather, petitioned for the incorporation of the village. The vote was 56 for, 52 against.”
Originally, farmers near the lakes accepted tourists as boarders, then added guest rooms onto their homes. Hotels and subdivisions of summer cottages were built. Hunting, fishing, dancing and gambling were big draws.
Gangster ”Bugs” Moran used to hang out on Grass Lake in the `20s, Wilton said, and there were still two bookies in town in the `40s and early
`50s.
While today Antioch is not as much of a resort town, it still has few commuters. And each summer, Wilton said, ”on the 4th of July we always have a big expo; this year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the rescue squad. We also have a big chicken barbecue given by the Lions Club on the first Sunday in August.”
But even as the village clings to its past, the future has been closing in.
”Over the last five years we`ve been watching this thing coming at us like a wave,” said real estate agent Mike Warren, who operates a Century 21 office in Antioch. ”From Libertyville and Grayslake it is rolling into Antioch full steam.
”There are two kinds of feeling: You`re either growing or you`re dying as a community. Most of us want to be on the growing side but realize it is important to plan that growth so it happens in a controlled manner.”
”Development is a big issue,” Wilton said. ”When I took office (in 1989; he also served a term from `73 to `77), we hired a planner to review all development. We can see it coming this way, so we know what to expect. We know we`re not going to be able to stop it, but we want to be able to control it.
”Antioch is small-town and wants to retain small-town character. We don`t want to be Arlington Heights or Libertyville, Mundelein or Vernon Hills. Put Gurnee in there, too. No one has ever proven to me bigger is better.”
To achieve its goals, the village is just finishing up a land-use plan for approximately 8,000 acres east of town, out past U.S. Highway 45.
”We`ve been working on annexing some of the property for quite a while,” Davis said. ”We annexed about 1,600 acres a year ago.”
Another key issue as Antioch goes through its growth throes is wetlands and the wildlife.
”I think there`s a general consensus that the wetlands need to be preserved for our children to enjoy and to have,” Warren said.
”With the lakes here, the wildlife has always been fantastic,” Wilton said. ”At night you have to be careful; you have to watch the sides of the road for deer. We definitely have some endangered species up in Red Wing Marsh-Deer Lake.”
He said the boundaries of this marsh are north of Illinois 173, east of Deep Lake Road, west of U.S. 45, and south of North Avenue.
”My thought on that is, if you ever open that up to the public like a campsite, it is gonna ruin it. I would say we could probably have an area where there would be a walkway, but that would be the extent of it and still keep it what it is.
”We`ve got a lot of land that will never be built on because it is wetlands,” Wilton continued. ”In Antioch Township, at least a third of the land will never be built on. There are too many ponds scattered around. As a result, we don`t get the cookie-cutter subdivisions.”
The subdivisions that are coming in, such as the already established Pine-Hill Lakes, an 82-acre community along Deep Lake Road and Illinois 173 and bounded on the west by Little Silver Lake, are trying to make concessions to the environment.
Pine-Hill Lakes, where the average buyers are ”mature, about-to-retire homesteaders,” the development`s brochure reads, promises ”the best of a vanishing dream, close to everything, yet far away from the common stress of suburbia.” It offers quiet walking trails, shimmering lakes, and vistas of distant hills and pastures, at least for the time being.
Pine-Hill Lakes offers ”eight acres of lakes, 13 acres of green space, one acre of nature preserve,” said Tom Cherrington, project manager. ”We have an abundance of jack pines to bring in the birds and shield the houses.” He proudly showed off ”our own tree nursery,” where trees, uprooted by housing, are transplanted from the site, then replanted eventually.
”The wetlands we have restored with the Army Corps of Engineers, trying to enhance them,” he said. ”We don`t gut a place. The houses all have a custom fit. Many are built on the side of a hill, while others are lakeside lots.” Prices start at about $187,900 for 2,400 square feet of living area.
One special feature of many Pine-Hill Lakes homes is a walkout basement, where residents whose houses are on the side of a hill can step out into bucolic beauty.
”We try to stay with the terrain,” said Cherrington, although, he added, ”it is extremely expensive to build with the terrain. But we thought people would pay a little more for a lot with these amenities.”
Another housing subdivision still in the planning is Heron Harbor, a water-oriented 470-acre development on Lake Marie. It is planned to have townhouses for $200,000 and up, plus single-family homes and cluster homes starting around $150,000.
”To protect the wetlands, 57 acres of wetlands have been carefully protected,” said Eve Lee, marketing spokeswoman for the developer, Fogelson Co., which also developed Hunt Club Farms near Gurnee.
Hunt Club ”has over 90 percent of its property open land; that`s why Fogelson feels equal to the task of taking on such a sensitive project,” Lee said. ”We should be under way this summer and have our first models by this fall.”
Windmill Creek, which is east of Illinois 83, is a development of 300 single-family homes of 2,700 to 3,500 square feet. Al Little, its president, said residents will have 28 acres of open acreage to enjoy, along with five lakes and a six-acre park.
”Antioch being the hub of the Chain of Lakes, our biggest concern right now is working with the Corps of Engineers to enhance the wetlands and prevent their being filled in and paved over,” said Little, who also is chairman of the environmental commission in the Village of Antioch. ”We want balanced growth. We don`t want to be just a bedroom community.”
Things came to a head about a year ago, when the Lake County Forest Preserve Commission was going to use its power of eminent domain to condemn a large portion of property between Deep Lake Road, which runs north and south, and U.S. 45. The area would have included the Red Wing Marsh, or fen, but it also included much surrounding farmland.
”We felt the boundaries were inappropriate,” Wilton said. ”They were condemning for peanuts-$1,000 to $2,000 an acre-properties families had owned for years, good farmland. I can see some of the area where you have wildlife preserves is wetlands. But I can`t see condemning farmlands to stop growth.” In response, the Antioch Township Property Owners Association was formed in January 1989, with Roger Siecrist, a local farmowner since 1978, as president. As a result of the group`s opposition, the project was shelved.
”We expect growth to occur,” said Siecrist, who said his group`s aim was more to rein in the use of eminent domain than to combat development itself. ”What we`re looking for is for that growth to be something that`s attractive to all of us. We`re trying to maintain some local control.”
Not surprisingly, the control of local taxes, and the increases in them, is a hot topic with many long-term residents. Wilton plays this down, saying that the costs of development should be met by imposing higher impact fees on builders to pay for improvements to park districts and schools.
”If new people are going to make us expand our school system, let them pay for it,” he said.
But for now, ”Yes, taxes have increased,” Siecrist said. ”In this area, in all of Lake County, we don`t have the population density that Cook, Du Page or parts of Kane have. As people migrate to the country area you have more need for services, and it is that process that has to be paid for.
”It is just the evolution of things. The only way we could stop it, I believe, is to put a fence around the county and not let anyone in.”
”The growth story is not just confined to Antioch,” said F.T. ”Mike”
Graham, who is leaving the Lake County Board after years as a vocal open-space advocate.
”Our tax base in Lake County will increase a billion and half dollars
(as a result of development),” Graham said. ”If what the promoters of growth say is true, our tax bill should remain stagnant. But I predict that across our country our tax bills will be 10 percent to 20 percent higher.
”What does this tell us? It tells us development doesn`t pay its way. The bigger you are, the more it will cost, along with a diminished quality of life. Bigger isn`t cheaper, but the development industry says land development is the gold rush of the `80s and `90s.”
How well Antioch survives the invasion of the prospectors remains to be seen.
