News on Virgil Development

Chicago Tribune
August 30, 1987

<>THE LITTLE TOWN BEYOND THE LAND BEYOND O'HARE
SUBURBIA NEAR, BUT VIRGIL REMAINS RUSTIC

Barbara Mahany
Chicago Tribune

The west Kane County town of Virgil, once a dairy depot 49 miles from Chicago, is today a hybrid junction-holding the line on country life but showing signs that suburbia is encroaching.

"Someone ought to try to get a wall put up west of Lily Lake, and that would stop it from coming," suggested Chuck Sauber, an inventor and the father of 16 who lives on the east edge of town in the farmhouse he was born in 67 years ago.

"Virgil is the closest thing to Chicago where you still need a hitching post, a holster and a gun," said Dr. Kirk Kresse, 31, a veterinarian who two years ago opened Virgil's first new business in 20 years, hanging his shingle outside a converted fertilizer shed. "There's nobody in charge out here."

But, Kresse says, "we're modernizing. Used to be front porches people sat out on. Now it's decks out back. And you pass Virgil View subdivision on your way into town: We've got our own suburb now, too."

Out where silos instead of shopping malls punctuate the plains, Virgil is not the first stop west of suburbia. But it is a place for anyone whose idea of a hopping Saturday night is a fried-chicken dinner with the folks followed by a moonlight stroll down a country lane where bullfrogs, crickets and katydids do the serenading.

The table of contents of the town, just west of Ill. Hwy. 47 along Ill. Hwy. 64, is brief: 2 streets, 46 houses, 3 pop machines, 2 flagpoles, a pay phone, a gas station, a church, a pig farm, the veterinary clinic, a grain elevator and a post office.

Settled in the mid-1800s by a few German Catholic farmers, the town in many ways seems insulated from the prefab world steamrolling its way west of Chicago, through the Fox River Valley.

Virgil is a place where the petunia wars of Marge Turk and Dorothy Bristol, played out in opposing garden plots on either side of Meredith Road, are considered serious summer sport and are followed closely by everyone in town.

Out in the part of the world where civilization is marked by an occasional church steeple and perhaps a blinking red stoplight, Virgil unfolds without warning.

Just over the creek where the road bumps and the willow weeps onto the guardrail, there it is. A nanny goat in a sideyard, a whiskey barrel spilling over with pink impatiens, substantial porches wrapping around sturdy clapboard homes: This is I.C. Trail, Virgil's east-west street.

Turn left at the abandoned dairy plant, cross over what was the railroad tracks and pass Norm's DX, where gas is pumped, horseshoes are pitched and "the best hors d'oeuvres money can buy" are cooked in a smoker at the back of the grease pit. There is no sign, but this is Virgil's other street.

For those who call it home, Virgil's anonymity is part of its charm. "We like to be undiscovered," said Sauber proudly.

"The world definitely needs its Virgils," he said. "The world needs small towns. Television has knocked personal communication out a lot. People don't visit like they used to. If you don't have poker at your house one night a week, how are the kids going to get a chance to listen to what real people are thinking?"

Indeed, in Virgil, with its abundance of Adirondack chairs set out on front lawn after front lawn and its Sunday institution of coffee and doughnuts in the church basement after the 9 o'clock mass, visiting is a way of life.

Morning here does not commence for either the farmers or the retirees without first pulling a stool up to a plate of fried potatoes, onions, sausage and horseradish at the counter at Hansen's in Elburn, a few miles down the road.

"Talk is the same as everywhere-the weather, how the crops are doing, who's doing what right and who's not, the Iran-contra thing," said Rev. Michael Librandy, 46, pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, who religiously dons a visored cap with a seed company's name on it along with his Roman collar to fit into the laymen's 5:30 a.m. ritual at Hansen's.

Then, some time around midmorning, the day's agenda is again mulled over by the housewives and the retirees with the leisure of daylight free time who mingle by the corkboard in the cedar-shingled vestibule of the post office.

And the day does not end in Virgil without the clink-clinking of the horseshoes ringing out from behind Norm's DX, a tar-papered garage where gas has been pumped since the 1930s.

"This is it-the social center of Virgil," said Norm Tischhauser, 56, a salty fix-it man and gas-station owner who's lost the tips of several fingers to fan belts over the past three decades.

"I am also, let's put it mildly, a . . . chef," he boasted, pointing to the smoker he made out of spare auto parts at the back of the garage. "You catch a fresh road kill, I smoke that up. A truck runs into some squirrel, a rabbit. Never gets throwed away. Grab it from the road before it gets run over, cool it, skin it. Smoke it up."

Such are the fixings served up to the horseshoe crowd that convenes every day, four seasons a year, sometime between 4:30 and 5 in the evening. The hors d'oeuvres are washed down with beer that is always on ice at Norm's. The back lot and piles of patched tires do well as Virgil's after-hours club.

But change is not unknown here.

"Railroad, that's why Virgil's here. Once it was gone, everything's run downhill," snapped Tischhauser, his torso twisted under the hood of a 1964 Ford he refused to let die. "Store's gone. Milk factory's gone. Everybody goes to the big city. Sad? Not for me it ain't. It made it quieter out here. I wouldn't be here if I didn't like the quiet."

Joe Turk, who runs Schuh's grain elevator and is the closest thing to Virgil's mayor-he being the one who spends the first Tuesday evening of every month at the Virgil Township meetings-pointed out that transportation changes in general have led to some of the town's unraveling.

Once the shopping malls and supermarkets were put up in bigger communities down the road, Turk said, there wasn't enough foot traffic in the Virgil Country Store to keep the shelves stocked with such staples as Rockford socks and Red Ball shoes and German sausage and Wonder bread.

Parenthetically, Turk added that besides a dwindling cash drawer, the store's owner, Fritz Stroebel-a man remembered for his knack of tying a bow on packages with one hand-decided it was time to call it quits after the last in a series of robberies, one in which the marauders tied an elderly woman to the toilet in back. "After that," Turk said, "it seemed like a good idea to close shop."

People in Virgil earlier had watched as the Chicago & Great Western Railroad tracks were ripped right out of town. And they'd watched the shuttering of the Virgil State Bank and the Virgil Implements Store. And they watched as Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School was emptied of its last pupils. But they did fight back in 1983 when the Postal Service threatened to close the post office. Enough, they said, and then collectively deluged Washington with a river of mail protesting the planned shutdown. The post office remains.

Part and parcel of the change that meandered through Virgil was the shift away from labor-intensive dairy farming after World War II.

Time was, inventor Sauber remembers, when families in town routinely numbered a dozen or more offspring to provide enough farmhands. With the shift toward such cash crops as sweet corn, there wasn't enough work on the farms, so children began commuting to jobs in St. Charles or De Kalb or moving out of town.

Those who stayed behind-like Dr. Kresse, his wife, Barb, and their two preschool daughters-are in no hurry to trade in the lifestyle.

"If we want to go to McDonald's, we can drive to St. Charles," he said of the eight-mile drive to the icon of drive-thru America.

Ironically, despite their eagerness to settle into a home in the little town in which Barb and her seven brothers and sisters were reared, the Kresses can't move in; the Virgil housing market is glutted, or more accurately, at a standstill. "They don't move here," said a frustrated Kresse, who must wait with his family in nearby Maple Park for something to open up in town. "They die."

And while the Kresses and the guys out back at Norm's might grumble about the evolution of small town ways, signaled most recently by the Pride Pantry superstation going up four miles down the way, old Chuck Sauber, who holds patents for 20-some inventions, including one for the burger-flipper at McDonald's, said he welcomes the advances.

"I'm a progressive-type person," he noted. "The only thing that's genuine and real in this world is change. Things get a little closer to perfect with each change."