The century-old cypress cedar in Old Knopf Cemetery stands like a lonely sentinel watching over Buffalo Grove`s fading agricultural past.
Legend has it that the German immigrants who first tilled the black, fecund soil along Buffalo Creek brought the tree from Europe to mark their final resting ground. The wizened branches that remain on the tree, several having been carried away in last spring`s fierce storms, provide the cemetery with minimal protection from the exhaust fumes emanating from the steady stream of traffic on Arlington Heights Road.
The two long rows of headstones inside the three-quarter-acre plot are well-maintained, though, a credit to the recent efforts of the Friends of Historic Buffalo Grove and several parishioners of Grace United Methodist Church, which owns the plot.
Buffalo Grove may be the town without a downtown, by golly, but it won`t be a town without a past.
”There isn`t anything unique about Buffalo Grove, but there was a history here,” said Blanche Kloman, a 50-year resident of the area who founded the town`s history museum (located in a Levitt development) and Friends of Historic Buffalo Grove.
The cemetery`s oldest inhabitant, farmer Martin Fehlmann, died in 1855. The 75 headstones, the last added only a year ago, belong for the most part to the farmers, wives and children who descended from the area`s original settlers.
Their descendants have something in common besides their final resting place: The farms their forebears tilled are no more.
One by one, they sold out. To men with names such as Frank and Levitt and Hamilton and Zale.
And on land where dairy cattle grazed and corn was grown and trees were raised and – if you go far back enough, the village manager and Kloman, the town`s unofficial historian, insist – the buffalo roamed, now you`ll find tract homes, shopping centers, office complexes and industrial parks.
Most residents of Buffalo Grove, a familiar-looking suburban landscape located 29 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, know little about the village`s history, and for good reason. Unlike those post-war suburbs that grew up around established towns, there was no Buffalo Grove to speak of before World War II.
The dairy farmers in the area would truck their milk to G.B. Weidner`s cheese factory or to a train station in nearby Wheeling for the morning run to Chicago. Trucks had replaced horse-drawn wagons during the century that white men farmed the area, but not much else changed. The population of the unincorporated area was less than 150.
St. Mary`s Catholic Church and cemetery on Buffalo Grove Road, a beacon for hundreds of farm families from the surrounding area, qualified as the center of town. Nearby was the Old General Store and Bill`s Buffalo House (now a Lou Malnati`s restaurant).
Indeed, the area`s rural character was so complete that Buffalo Grove`s amateur historians have a hard time finding a suitable past to hold onto. ”We looked at the general store to see if it could be a historic site,” said Bill Reid, a village trustee and resident since 1960. ”But it had been added onto, changed and rebuilt so many times that it didn`t warrant historic designation.”
The store was torn down in 1985 during the widening of Buffalo Grove Road.
Even the town`s name provokes a skeptical shrug from many residents.
”They say at one time this is where the buffalo roamed, but I don`t think so,” said Alicia Anderson, a local Realtor who took time out from her busy day peddling quarter-million-dollar homes to answer a reporter`s queries on local lore.
However, the name is in fact derived from the English translation of the Pottawatomi Indian name for Buffalo Creek, which flows through the heart of the village. ”At one point in our history, the bison and buffalo fed on our prairies,” said Kloman. ”Tradition tells us they came to Buffalo Creek to water several times a day.”
Village Manager William Balling points out that Indian artifacts and buffalo bones have been unearthed along the creek.
The village is trying to beef up identification with its bovine past. A statue of a buffalo stands in front of the village`s main recreation center and developer Alan Hamilton plans to erect a second monument to its namesake sometime next year.
These efforts to connect the village to its pastoral past aside, the concrete (and wood and shingle and neon and strip mall) history of Buffalo Grove has been written over the last 35 years by a steady stream of real estate developers who found its rich farmland an irresistible target.
Al Frank, president of Buffalo Grove Home Builders Inc., began building homes in the late 1950s. His small, one-story homes, most without basements, typified the low-cost starter homes that were built in that era for World War II and Korean War veterans.
Frank takes credit for incorporating the village in 1958. According to the town`s official history, Frank was anxious to remove his burgeoning home construction business from the purview of planning officials in Cook County and nearby Wheeling.
”We decided if we were able to draw a little map that got in 25 electors and 100 people, we could form our own village,” the history quotes Frank as saying in 1977. ”It somehow consisted of only people who were related to us or who worked for us or for one reason or another we had psychoanalyzed and decided they would be favorable to us.”
Incorporation won 38 to 8. Population 164. Acres 67. Homes 42.
The debate in Buffalo Grove has never been growth versus no-growth, a familiar suburban squabble. It`s always been about how fast and how dense growth should be. ”The whole idea was expansion,” said Kloman.
In the wake of the incorporation vote, the developers came and came and came and the village annexed and annexed and annexed. After Frank came Levitt (yes, the same Levitt who built Levittown). The most recent arrival was the Zale Group, which bought the 440-acre Fiore Nursery and has converted it into a planned unit development – Woodlands at Fiore – complete with golf course
(designed by Ted Nugent), single-family homes, townhomes and giant lots suitable for custom building.
Residents of Buffalo Grove identify themselves by the developments they live in: Arbors or Cambridge on the Lake; Hidden Lakes Village or the Highlands; Strathmore Grove or Windfield Estates.
Today, the population of Buffalo Grove is approaching 35,000 on 7.9 square miles. Ultimately, Buffalo Grove will comprise 11.4 square miles and include 52,000 people, according to the village`s official community guide.
When approaching the geographical center of Buffalo Grove by car, one is struck by the presence of open fields in the middle of the town. ”The outside envelope is basically completed,” said Balling. ”It will be mostly in-fill for the next five to seven years.”
One of the larger in-fill projects of recent years is an effort to give Buffalo Grove something it has never had: a downtown. Real estate developer Stanley Lieberman`s Town Center – a joint venture with Seymour Taxman and Melvin Simon & Associates – opened earlier this year.
It was built using tax increment financing, a development finance tool created by the state legislature to help redevelop blighted areas.
However, calling Town Center a downtown stretches the imagination. Surrounded by parking lots and landscaped entranceways connecting it to two four-lane highways, the 113,000-square-foot retail mall looks like, well, a mall.
”There have been a lot of experiments with fancy European-style pedestrian malls to create new downtowns, but that doesn`t meet the needs of today`s shopping public,” said Village Manager Balling. Buffalo Grove`s downtown has plenty of free parking.
In any case, it appears that shoppers in Buffalo Grove aren`t sentimental about not having a downtown. About a third of the mall at Illinois Highway 83 and Lake-Cook Road is vacant after some stores pulled out because of a lack of patronage.
”Dundee Road and Buffalo Grove Road (on the southern edge of the village) was the real center to me when we moved out here,” said Fred Schroeder, a resident since 1972 and a member of Friends of Historic Buffalo Grove. ”You had one grocery store, one gas station and a bowling alley.”
The bowling alley was owned by Rick Casares, a former Bears` fullback. According to Schroeder, it was known for late-night carousing – within limits, of course, since the old police station was next door.
”That`s what I consider the town center, not this thing,” he said with a wave of his hand in the direction of the struggling mall.
The bowling alley, like rural Buffalo Grove, is no more. The place went out of business and several years ago was converted into a furniture store.
So far, the Friends of Historic Buffalo Grove haven`t pushed the former bowling alley for landmark status.
BUFFALO GROVE AT A GLANCE
Population: 29,935 (1990 estimate). Change, 1980-90: +34.7 percent. Median age: 30.0 years. Racial/ethnic mix: white (non-Hispanic), 92.8 percent;
Hispanic, 2.5 percent; black, 1.0 percent; other, 3.7 percent.
Area: 7.9 square miles, in Cook and Lake Counties. Average household income: $54,488 (1990 estimate). Per capita income: $17,692 (1987 estimate), 63rd of 262 in six-county Chicago area.
Median price of single-family home: Cook County, $157,800; Lake County, $179,500 (1990 estimate). Average annual property tax on median-priced home:
Cook, $1,777; Lake, $3,053. Average resale price (11 months ended 11/30/90):
$173,264.
Public schools:
District Enrollment Pupils Expenditure
(no. of schools) per teacher per pupil
Kildeer-Countryside 96 (4) 2,430 20.3 $3,448
Aptakisic-Tripp 102 (3) 1,715 18.2 $4,503
Stevenson HS 125 (1) 1,879 17.0 $6,902
Wheeling 21 (11) 5,824 20.3 $4,760
Northwest Twp. HS 214 (6) 10,023 17.1 $8,582
Average American College Test score: Stevenson H.S. 23.3 (97th percentile).
Average ACT score: Buffalo Grove H.S. 22.6 (92nd percentile).
Driving distances: To Loop, 30 miles; to O`Hare International Airport, 15 miles. Rush-hour commute: Chicago Northwestern northwest line train service from Arlington Heights station to Northwestern station (no direct link, must take Pace bus 690 or car to Arlington Heights); 34 minutes express, 50 minutes local; $89.10 monthly pass.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census; Metra; Illinois State Board of Education; TRW Real Estate Information Services; Stark Realtors; Wheeling Township Assessor.
BUFFALO GROVE MARKETPLACE
What-Four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath, Colonial
Where-23 Longridge Ct., Old Farm Village subdivision
Features-Nine rooms, located on cul-de-sac with lake view, custom deck, underground sprinklers, partially finished basement. Built 1986.
List price-$259,900
What-Three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath, ranch
Where-882 Shambliss Lane
Features-Eight rooms, full finished basement, rec room with fireplace and wet bar. Built 1978.
List price-$177,900
What-Four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath, Colonial
Where-1331 Larchmont Dr., Strathmore Grove subdivision
Features-Eight rooms, covered patio, fenced yard, exterior trim recently painted. Built 1979.
List price-$174,900
Buying it: An approximation of what it would take to buy the Larchmont Drive home at list price.
Loan Down Loan Closing Interest Monthly Qualifying
type payment amount costs rate payment income
Fixed $35,000 $139,900 $4,472.50 9.5% $1,452.69 $62,200
Balloon $17,500 $157,400 $1,604.60 9.625% $1,660.12 $71,100
Note: ”Monthly payment” includes principal, interest, taxes and property insurance. ”Closing costs” include points, application fee, and related charges. Both loans are amortized over 30 years. The five-year balloon has an option to refinance after that period for the remaining 25 years.
Sources: Jeff Stone, Coldwell Banker, Buffalo Grove (708-541-2000);
Freeman Mortgage Services, Buffalo Grove (708-215-9390).
