My Experience of Change; Our Need for Continuity

 

John Hallwas

 

            My wife and I recently attended the annual reunion of the Wells clan (my mother’s family) at a park up in Lake County, a mile from the Wisconsin border. That mid-summer get-together has been held for many decades, and in a sense, it now symbolizes fading generations as well as family continuity. And my annual visit to that once-rural area, which I left when I headed for college in 1963, always prompts reflection on my own experience of cultural change.

            My maternal grandparents, Curtis and Ida Wells, were farm folks, born in the 1880s, and they have been gone since the 1960s. Their eight children, residing primarily in Lake County, dominated that family reunion for decades, and now that generation, too, is almost gone.

            At the center of the Wells family is my Aunt Virginia, who will be 95 in a few days. No one knows more about all those relatives than she does, and no one has had a more positive impact on them. In fact, she symbolizes that deeply rooted, multi-generational family. For many years she also headed the association that managed nearby Hickory Grove Cemetery, where my parents, my maternal grandparents, and dozens of other relatives are buried. She understands, and epitomizes, the traditional relationship between family, local history, and identity.

            To talk with Virginia about her childhood in rural Lake County, near Antioch, is to hear about the old Tamarack Farm, along Rt. 173, where she was raised; the one-room Bean Hill School, which she and her siblings attended; the last horse-drawn buggies and wagons, that went past the farm in the1920s and 1930s —and much else that is gone. The area was so quietly rural that when Route 173 was paved in 1933, she often roller skated for miles on the new hard road.

            That early Wells dairy farm, which I recall, too, from my pre-school years—when my brothers and I chased chickens in the yard and frolicked in the barn’s hayloft—vanished decades ago, when a neighborhood of modern, look-alike houses was built there. The later Wells family farm was on Savage Road, several miles away. There I watched my uncles operate Grandpa’s old threshing machine, loved to see the Holstein cows come ambling in at milking time, and later, learned to drive a tractor. That farm has also been obliterated by a new neighborhood, as Chicago’s vast suburbanization has extended almost to the Wisconsin border.

          The livestock farm where my Aunt Virginia and her late husband resided for decades, surrounded by a vast expanse of fields, woods, and wetlands, is now the site of a Walmart-dominated shopping area on Route 173. And it looks like a place where no one has ever lived.

            The commercial and residential growth of north-central Lake County has been so dramatic that the quiet, farm-dominated world that I knew, and the Wells family was part of, is all but gone. When I was born, in 1945, that area had some 1,500 farms, including about 400 dairy operations. Now there are just three dairy farms and some dozens of other ones.   

             As for the village of Antioch, which had about 1,100 people when I started school and 2,200 ten years later, I vividly recall the many small stores—such as Powles Grocery Store, Reeves Drug Store, and Williams Brothers Department Store—all of which disappeared long ago. The St. Ignatius Episcopal Church building (a white-frame structure built in 1863 on Main Street), where my brothers and I not only attended services with our mother and grandmother but went to Sunday School, is no longer a church but is an historic site. A few blocks away, the building where I attended high school—and my father and mother did, too, many years earlier—has been partly demolished and then expanded, so it no longer resembles what I recall.

           The Antioch Township Library of my youth was a small, white-frame building on North Main Street. A former residence (built in 1885) with seven small rooms, it still looked like someone’s home. The librarian was a dedicated, friendly woman, Marian Harden, who seemed to know every book on the shelves. If I asked for a particular title, she immediately told me where it was located or whether it was already checked out. I loved to go there, even as a small kid. But that library was replaced decades ago by a modern brick one, ten times larger, that now has 140,000 books. The lovely 1885 home-that-became-a-library was torn down in 1970.   

           The most popular recreational place fifty years ago was a bowling alley, west of town, built in 1953 for local investors by my father (a contractor, and an ardent bowler). My brothers and I learned to bowl there, and they bowled long after I left. But it’s now closed and dismantled.

          Our house was near Antioch Lake, on the southwest edge of town, where my brothers and I fished in solitude during the warm weather and skated along the wild shoreline in the winter. Neighborhoods have now developed around the lake, too. The woods east of town where Mother took us on hickory nutting expeditions is yet another neighborhood, filled with homes.

           The little village I knew now includes many modern neighborhoods, encompasses nine square miles, boasts a new 25-million-dollar industrial park, and has over 15,000 people.

            So, the world I grew up in is substantially gone. No wonder some of my books focus on small towns that have changed dramatically over the years—or on figures like bootlegger Kelly Wagle and outlaws Ed and Lon Maxwell, who had problematic relationships to community.

            And I am not alone. My experience of cultural change has just been more severe than most. As William Leach points out in his book, “Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life” (1999), millions of us now inhabit “the landscape of the temporary.” And as a result, “many Americans feel the same longing, the same need for continuity and stability, and for confident attachment to a place.”

            Indeed, as cultural change accelerates, our need for continuity increases—for our very identity is bound up with the location, or locations, that have shaped and centered our lives. And for many older folks in America, those places have all but disappeared. We are adrift.  

           Of course, rapid change will continue. That’s why community tradition is important, historical organizations are crucial, town festivals that celebrate local identity are vital, and older buildings are significant—and should be maintained. Or as Winifred Gallagher says in “The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions” (1993), “We need places that support, rather than fragment, our lives.” A smaller town, that fosters socializing and promotes awareness of others, does that better than a growing metropolis.    

           For me personally, as with so many older Americans now, my place of origin, my small village, may have essentially vanished, but it still exists, inwardly, as a kind of spiritual yardstick against which I measure my growth over the years. And that vividly remembered place will always be deeply related to who I am and what I have done with my life.