A penny still buys something of value in this seat of North Central Illinois’ Bureau County.
In fact, it buys the most valuable commodity of all: time–12 minutes on a parking meter in downtown Princeton. If you happen be from Chicago, 115 miles to the east, there is a strong temptation to stand awhile and fill the meter with pennies just to marvel at the bargain.
Perhaps time is cheaper in Princeton because it goes more slowly. After all, this is a place where a car hitting a deer and the theft of half a cultivator will top the police blotter; where the Jaycees and the local churches sell butterfly pork chop sandwiches for 3 bucks at the Soldiers and Sailors Park on Fridays; and where the whole town of 7,200 turns out on the courthouse lawn for the senior prom.
Actually, it’s not the whole town, just all the relatives and friends of the Princeton High seniors, who sit on lawn chairs to watch their cherished teens parade down the walk to the courthouse steps in their tuxes and ball gowns.
Princeton also has another side: Residents who commute to the Chicago area to work; urban expatriates who keep up with business in the metropolis by phone, computer and fax; local shops to help residents get onto the Internet; and an inflating real estate market.
This quaint community set where the fertile prairie meets the rolling Illinois River Valley is one of those Polaroid paradises all across America that are attracting stressed-out city and suburban dwellers who want simpler surroundings but need to keep up an economic lifeline to the urban center.
The phenomenon is so strong in the West that it has generated a whole new research enterprise. The Center for the New West, a Denver-based independent research center, has an ongoing study of what it calls “lone eagles”–described as “knowledge workers who are abandoning life in large cities and the 9-to-5 world and moving to small-town America or rural areas.”
So many of these types are invading towns in and near the Colorado Rockies that Mary Chapman, a senior fellow at New West, describes it as “the great nerd drive.”
And, indeed, some former Chicagoans, from freelance writers to Internet stock traders, are among the nerd herd heading to the spectacularly scenic areas of the West, following a cherished fantasy of a home office nestled a window away from the great outdoors.
But others are limiting their geographic scope, seeking charm, ease and a gentler pace of life in small Midwestern towns that are near enough to the big city they left to keep their ties there intact.
In places such as Princeton and Galena in northern Illinois, or Milton and Ft. Atkinson in southern Wisconsin, refugees from Niles to Naperville are making their homes.
One is Art Seeds, who sold the business he founded and moved to Princeton from Naperville in 1992. Now he does consulting work for his former company, Association Management Systems, and some other companies as well.
With his fax machine, computer and two voice-mail boxes, he is able to keep in touch with his association management clients and also run a new business managing and selling farmland.
At 71, Seeds says, “I’m not retired from my workload, but from going to the office all day.”
He still goes back to Naperville an average of once a week, to check in at his old office and visit two children who live in Naperville and Downers Grove, but he has become part of the Princeton community, helping out at the Chamber of Commerce and joining the board of the Bureau Valley Country Club.
“Princeton is a tremendous community with a lot of friendly people,” said Seeds.
He and his wife fondly remember Naperville when they moved there 40 years ago, but lament the traffic and congestion that came with growth.
They began exploring the Princeton area when they began coming out to a vacation home on nearby Lake Thunderbird in the 1980s, and decided to move there permanently after rejecting the notion of getting away from the Midwest entirely because of their Chicago-area ties.
“Naperville was Princeton when we moved there in 1958,” said Seeds’ wife, Jan. “There was open farmland and a rural aspect to life.”
Her nostalgic comment echoes that of another Princeton area newcomer whose life increasingly straddles Chicago-region business and rural tranquility.
“Princeton has that quaint country atmosphere and the people are not as rushed. It’s the way Mokena was 50 years ago,” said Bill Weber, a real estate developer in that southwest suburb.
Four years ago Weber bought a 380-acre farm in deeply furrowed, copse-dotted valley land near the town of Tiskilwa just south of Princeton and built a palatial log house where he spends long weekends both playing and working.
“We’re spending half the time on the farm, half at home in Mokena,” said Weber. “I have a fax and everything there. My development business is such now, working the engineers and villages getting development approvals, that I can carry on a great deal by phone and fax.”
Weber, 62, who began his career as a residential developer when he subdivided a farm he owned in Mokena, didn’t reflect on the irony of his own contribution to Mokena’s not being the Mokena it was 50 years ago.
But he revels in going back to the way things used to be: “We have turkeys and pheasants and deer, all those things that are no longer prevalent in the (Mokena) area where we live and that I grew up with.”
Urbanites such as Weber who work part-time in their rural vacation homes are a bigger group than those who pull up stakes completely, according to Loyola University sociologist Kenneth Johnson, who has been studying widespread non-metropolitan population growth in recent years.
“There are a lot of people who went (somewhere) on vacation. They’re a little older and their kids are through school, and they bought a second home,” he said. “They are closer to retirement, they can work away from the office and they start to spend more time there.”
Freelance writers, however, are one group that do have the flexibility to settle permanently where they want, especially with the advent of e-mail, Johnson noted.
Le Roy Groff, the office manager at Zearing Computer Tech Inc., a Princeton store that sells local-phone access to the Internet (using a hook-up provided by a Chicago company), said quite a few of his customers are Princeton residents who send manuscripts all over the country as e-mail attachments.
Others, including a local jewelry-maker, market their products nationally through Internet home pages, he added.
One writer is Carl Hixon, a former director at Leo Burnett Co. in Chicago who now lives on a wooded ridge four miles east of Princeton and is working on a novel set in the area about the effect of pollution on local wildlife.
Hixon, 73, who had been living in Darien, took early retirement from the giant advertising firm some years ago, and moved to the Princeton area in the early 1990s.
His wife, whom he describes as an “Internet freak,” goes online to dig up research for him on pollution and animals that he can use in the book.
“She pulls pounds and pounds of paper out of the printer,” he said.
The couple recently adopted an infant boy whom they intend to raise in their sprawling home on a 10-acre piece of land surrounded by forest. “It’s a good place to bring kids up,” he said.
Seeds, Weber and Hixon might be described by the Center for the New West as a cross between “Freelancers”–refugee independent consultants and professionals–and “Bald Eagles,” migrant retirees who bring their acquired wealth and skills to little towns.
There are others outside New West’s knowledge worker categories, such as the Naperville firefighter who lives in Princeton, or the airline pilot who works out of O’Hare International Airport and lives in Fort Atkinson, in the moraine area of southeastern Wisconsin. Both can commute the long distances because they work on an extended-shift-on, extended-time-off basis.
Aspirants to New West’s “Planter” group — entrepreneurs who move to small towns to start their own business–are Mary and John Bianucci, who have a print shop in Morton Grove and formerly worked in downtown Chicago in the commodities trading business.
Last summer the 30-something couple went camping near Milton, a Wisconsin town of about 5,000 not far from Fort Atkinson, were impressed with the calm and welcoming spirit of the place, and are looking for a Milton home.
There they plan to work on forecasting tools to sell to commodities market clients and perhaps open up a second print shop while they continue to operate the one in Morton Grove with an on-site printer, said Mary Bianucci. They might even get into developing herbal products, she added.
In their former office near the Board of Trade in the Loop they got swallowed up by an “aggressive way of life,” Bianucci said. “But the world is not all fast action.”
Their impression of Milton was “an immediate `Yes,’ ” she added. “It was very human, very trustworthy, not at all competitive like (in Chicago). People value love for life and comfort and ease.”
The very appeal of places such as Princeton and Milton, of course, can pose a danger to their comfort and ease. People who move in from the outside inevitably bring different outlooks and habits and, often most corrosively, different levels of wealth.
In some towns in the Rockies, the conflict between newcomers and long-time residents is becoming severe as changes impact the economy and environment, according to New West`s Chapman.
“Housing prices are way up. Services are emphasized instead of growing things, mining things and making things. Small towns are under siege,” she said.
In Princeton, the influx from Chicago has begun to affect real estate values, according to Ray Mabry, owner of Success Realty. He said 10 to 15 percent of his business comes from Chicago-area buyers, and many can get a home the same or better than their existing home for $100,000 less in Princeton.
The average sale price in Princeton this year has been about $82,000, though the town’s grand old Victorian homes are going for a lot more–nearly $200,000.
But prices can rise quickly. One Chicago area woman bought a handsome dwelling on a street of rambling homes near the courthouse for $95,500 last October, decided against moving to Princeton and put the house back on the market for $188,500–a 97 percent increase in less than a year.
“Our market has gotten a little bit inflated for the local people who are trying to compete,” Mabry said.
Another drawback to the rural migration is that newcomers with a fantasy of getting away from it all must face a challenge they often don’t anticipate–a sense of isolation away from friends, family and familiar surroundings.
“People can move to a new location and feel they’re not accepted,” said Seeds, who forestalled such problems by becoming involved quickly in local organizations.
“People who are aggressive and outgoing have fewer complaints,” he said. “The ideal way is to become part of the community and contribute to it.”
