For decades, surveying the political landscape in rural McHenry County was about as exciting as watching an ear of corn grow.
Consider the tiny burg of Greenwood, which has had no political landscape at all since it was founded in 1840. No war on crime. No local tax hikes. No mudslinging mayoral campaigns. Nothing.
About the closest thing to politicking, farmer George Rasmussen said, was when “we used to have a general store and have a bull session there every day. But the store closed a few years ago, so we don’t have that anymore.”
While Greenwood’s languid lifestyle has barely changed, its politics show unprecedented signs of life. Now, neighbors gather not to swap snapshots of grandchildren or talk crop prices, but to discuss county court battles and possible village trustee candidates.
Greenwood’s new excitement stems from the April 4 election, when residents there and in neighboring Barnard Mill voted to incorporate their hamlets as villages.
Burgeoning growth is hardly the impetus for incorporating. The two new villages could fit their combined population of 600 into a typical Schaumburg subdivision. As for the future, neither Greenwood nor Barnard Mill has an ambitious growth agenda.
Nor do they want one.
The new villages reflect a trend among McHenry County’s smallest towns, started last year by nearby Ringwood.
The strategy: incorporation as a means of fending off suburban development, which has, over the past three decades, spread farther from Chicago and turned once-rural landscapes into towns congested with traffic, shopping malls and fast-food restaurants.
“Oh God, I hope we never get a McDonald’s here,” said lifelong Greenwood resident Nancy Wilson, 59. “It just seems like things aren’t like they used to be. As kids, there was so little traffic in town, we could take our sleds and slide down the middle of the road.”
Expressing similar fears, Ringwood residents enlisted state Rep. Ann Hughes (R-Woodstock) to draft the so-called “Ringwood law.”
Signed by Gov. Jim Edgar last June, the law relaxed the requirements for forming villages from a minimum of 2,500 people living within 4 square miles to 200 people living within 2 square miles.
The law, which expires at the end of the year, was meant for use solely by Ringwood. But Greenwood and Barnard Mill seized on it as an opportunity to control their destiny. It also is being explored by nearby Solon Mills, political observers say.
By legalizing their boundary lines, the new villages have erected a fence that they hope will preserve their open space and sense of community.
“We just would like to remain ourselves,” said Libbie Aavang, 62, a leader of The Greenwood Group, which won its incorporation fight by a 10-to-1 ratio. More than 90 percent of Greenwood’s 130 registered voters went to the polls, organizers said.
Aavang and her neighbors spot the beginnings of suburban sprawl to the east in Wonder Lake, and fret over what they see: Single-family home subdivisions, rapid growth and property taxes.
“Wonder Lake is a fine community, but we don’t want to be part of them,” Aavang said. “We don’t want to pay for their roads and sewers.”
Wonder Lake officials and the Madison Realty Group of Chicago, which owns 180 acres in the Greenwood area, have responded to Greenwood’s upstart village by challenging the Ringwood law in court as unconstitutional.
“We’re kind of a convenient excuse” for incorporation, Wonder Lake Village President Kate Topf said. “Our boundaries have not changed much since 1976.”
What added insult, Topf said, was the decision to stake Greenwood’s eastern border right at the doorstep of the Wonder Lake Village Hall-across the street on Thompson Road.
Once a summer encampment for the Potawatomi, according to local legend, Wonder Lake was founded as a vacation resort for Chicagoans. It was built around a man-made lake in 1930.
“When I was a young boy, that was not a lake there,” said Rasmussen, 71, his arms folded. “It was a cow pasture. You could walk right across there.”
Pioneers first settled Greenwood in 1833, naming the town sometime around 1840.
“Greenwood Village lies in a beautiful vale surrounded by oak-topped hills and watered by the rippling, chattering Nippersink,” gushed an essay commemorating the town’s centennial.
The town might have thrived had it been chosen as the McHenry County seat in 1843 (it was runner-up to Woodstock). Regardless, “The very earliest settlers of this community came imbued with the spirit of morality, integrity, and the love and adoration of Almighty God,” the essay recounted.
About 2 miles to the northeast, pioneers started a mill in 1866. The Barnard Mill building still stands today, operated as a grist mill of a different sort-a bar and restaurant.
There and throughout town, residents debated the Barnard Mill incorporation more fiercely than their counterparts in Greenwood. It passed by only two votes, 86-84, on Election Day.
“There was a concerted effort to discourage this,” said Alfred Stresen-Reuter, 54, a part-time farmer and leader of Barnard Mill’s incorporation effort. “Throughout the upper part of this county, other towns could do the same. It’s a control thing.”
Stresen-Reuter and his fellow organizers refuse to discuss who might be opposing them.
But longtime residents who voted against incorporation, such as Libby Johnson, cite their allegiances to county officials.
“The county took good care of us,” Johnson, 68, said.
“We had no problem the way it was. And I don’t think we can afford to become an incorporated area. We have no tax base.”
The only other choice, Stresen-Reuter insisted, would be to let developers have their way.
Driving through town on a recent afternoon, he pointed to field after field owned by real estate speculators, who he believes are waiting for a building boom.
“Our feeling was that through creating our own zoning, we could maintain the rural atmosphere,” he said.
The irony, Topf said, “is that now we have three villages that all intersect. We’re neck-to-neck, border-to-border.
“And you can’t predict, 20 years from now, how those villages will grow. In the long run, I don’t believe it (the incorporation) is responsible.”
