They backed Bart the bull.
They got blue in the face over painting a barn red. They had a barnyard squabble over exactly what should go in the barnyard. They even jousted over a windmill.
But after 14 years of operation and succeeding in their main goal of saving the North Shore’s last remaining farm, members of the award-winning advocacy group–Citizens Organized for Wagner’s–have decided to put themselves out to pasture.
The group decided in January to disband, frustrated by a five-year-long battle with the Glenview Park District over decisions about how to run Wagner Farm–decisions COWs members believe are diluting the rustic nature of the 19-acre homestead farm.
“They’re running [park] programs and they’ve kind of glitzed the place up,” said Norma Morrison, vice president and a founding member of COWs. “It’s not the farm we set up to preserve.”
COWs will officially cease to exist after it finishes its last project–erecting a memorial plaque, hopefully sometime later this year, at the farm letting visitors know how it was saved.
You won’t hear any complaints about the group’s demise from park officials, many irritated by the group’s constant criticism in the five years since the farm was acquired.
“They weren’t an advocacy group,” said the farm’s on-site director, Todd Price, whose ideas for the farm have been frequently lambasted by COWs.
COWs was formed in 1991 when three Glenview residents– Morrison, Henry Hill and Mike Luxem–found a common cause in preserving the bucolic sight of the white-and-black Holstein cows roaming the pasture that surrounded the weathered barn at the corner of Lake Street and Wagner Road.
Morrison and Luxem had been friends with Pete Wagner, who died in 1991, and his sister, Rose Wagner, who died in 1997, and cherished the farm their grandfather, John, first bought about 1881 when it was 130-acre farm, Luxem said.
After hundreds of people signed a petition they put together, the Park District agreed to put a referendum on the ballot. With COWs pushing people to the polls, voters approved it in 1998, and after two years of legal wrangling the property was bought in 2000 for $7.2 million.
That was really the beginning of the end for COWs.
COWs wanted to preserve the farm largely as the Wagners had run it, said Mark Steger, COWs president, but the Park District is “seeking to make this some type of generic, Northern Illinois farm from the 1920s.”
Though COWs was recognized in 2003 with the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois’ advocacy award for saving the farm, COWs members said their views have been ignored since 2000.
Because of the passion COWs members brought, the recent battles with the Park District brought as much attention to the farm as the original effort to buy the property.
Most famously, COWs members disagreed with a decision to send the farm’s most popular resident, Bart the bull, to the slaughterhouse and, instead, helped find him a home at an animal sanctuary.
They’ve bickered over the Park District’s decision to paint the 62 year-old barn red, instead of keeping its weathered look.
They argued with the Park District over the introduction of other farm animals–pigs and sheep–beyond the cows and chickens that used to rule the roost.
“They’re even going to put in a fake windmill,” said Morrison. “There never was a windmill there.”
The final straw is the looming construction of a 10,000-square-foot “heritage center” that will be used for park programs on the site–a building that will “dwarf” the original farm buildings, Steger said.
And though Morrison is saddened by the end of the group she helped start, she’s still reminded of its greatest success every time she drives by the site.
“At least there aren’t houses there,” she said.
