Still steaming along

Some 50 years ago, people approaching the town of Villa Grove in northeastern Douglas County probably heard it before they saw it.

Some 30 to 40 trains rolled through town each day, and each one blew its whistles at the crossings. The chug-a-lugging steam engines stopped to change crews and engines drop cabooses.

Banging and clanging could be heard day and night coming from the roundhouse, where the engines were repaired and cleaned. And all kinds of hammering and buzzing sounds emanated from the shops where the boxcars were repaired, repainted and cleaned.

And every workday at 7 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. sirens blew to announce the change of work and dinner shifts. A school bell rang at 1 p.m., calling students back after lunch.

It was a humming little city of about 2,500 with about 1,500 people working at the Villa Grove rail yards during its heyday during World War II. And that doesn't count the hundreds of railroad men who came through on the trains from Chicago to St. Louis, according to Dr. William Jones, a local dentist who has become an expert on the town's railroad history.

"I grew up living right across the street (from the rail yards) and so we saw the trains go by all the time and the guys working on the track and the gandy dancers who drove the spikes in and all that. It was always fascinating," Jones said. "It was a noisy, busy place.

"When you hung your clothes on the line to dry, if the wind was out of the wrong direction and you heard a steam engine coming, you'd need to run out to get your clothes off the line because the smoke and soot and stuff would mean you'd have to wash them again."

Of the 30 to 40 trains a day, six or seven would carry passengers. Each one stopped to change crews and take on water and coal. Some had nicknames like the Meadowlark and the Cardinal.

"And all the mail came on the train in those days," Jones said. "Somebody from the post office would meet every train to dispatch mail and pick up whatever came in. So in those days, you could mail a letter to Danville in the morning and perhaps get a reply in the afternoon."

Boom! There it is

The town's history isn't all about the trains. It began in 1887 as a small farming community with a few businesses, houses and grain elevator on the east side of the Embarras River.

But in 1903, the Central and Eastern Illinois Railroad decided that Villa Grove was the halfway point between St. Louis and Chicago, so it bought land west of the river and put up a brick passenger station, an 18-stall roundhouse, three shop buildings, a coal chute and cinder pit and several terminal tracks, and dug two water reservoirs.

"This was a boomtown," said Chuck Knox, 69, a lifelong resident. "In a year's time, it was here!"

Knox remembers when he was a kid, everybody gathered in town on Saturday night. They'd come early and park their cars so they'd have a place to sit and gab later, he said, then walk home and return later. The folks would buy groceries, do other shopping and often see a movie at the Gem theater.

"There were four or five grocery stores, a couple lumber yards, two hardware stores, two or three doctors," Knox said.

About half of the kids he knew had a father who worked on the railroad. Most of the other half were farmers. There seemed to be no predominance of Germans, Irish or other ethnicities.

"This town was a melting pot," Knox said. "They came from everywhere."

Pancake Capital of the World

In 1940, a couple flour salesmen asked a Villa Grove grocer if he'd be interested in serving free pancakes at his store.

Donations came from Pillsbury Flour, McLaughlin Coffee, Clearview Dairy and Staley's syrup, and residents reported the free pancakes were deliciously light and fluffy.

Through the years, more and more pancakes were flipped. The crowds continued to grow. Some estimate that 20,000 people showed up to eat pancakes and sausage by the late 1950s.

"We had a big parade and there was a huge crowd every year for the event," Jones said. "The railroads sponsored a free trip for the Pancake Queen, who got to ride the train to Chicago and she got to stay at a nice hotel and appear on 'Don McNeil's Breakfast Club' (radio show)."

Some newspaper clippings from the '50s hailed Villa Grove as the Pancake Capital of the World.

Another highlight of the summer festival was the frequent appearance of celebrity guest Smiley Burnette, who once worked at Tuscola's WDZ radio station and was Gene Autry's sidekick in movies and TV.

"I've got a picture around here somewhere that was taken of me and Smiley Burnette," Knox said.

The last Pancake Festival was in July 1958. When organizers got together to plan the 1959 event, they decided they'd lost the oomph to continue. It had become so large that it was too expensive and unwieldy for volunteer labor.

"It got so big, it was more than we could handle after a while," said John Leon, former mayor and pancake flipper.

"But those pancakes were good. And the people came from all over."

State champs

One can only imagine the depths of excitement in 1923 when the Villa Grove High School basketball team won the regional, advanced to the sectional and moved onward into the state Final Four on the University of Illinois campus.

Villa Grove High had fewer than 100 students, and the tallest player was 5-foot-10. When the Blue Devils faced the big city team of Rockford for the championship, sports writers could not control the temptation to use a proliferation of David and Goliath analogies when writing about the match.

It's said that on the Saturday evening when the championship game was played, the streets of Villa Grove were eerily still and quiet.

All the residents who were able had boarded a special train that took them to Glover, near St. Joseph, where they then transferred to the Interurban for the trip into Champaign-Urbana.

There were no radio broadcasts, so the few folks who stayed in town depended on periodic updates coming in by telegraph.

Villa Grove won the game in the final moments 32-29, and the five players became instant local celebrities. Through the years they frequently returned for reunions with coach Curtis Pulliam.

None of the team members are still living, but longtime resident Bob Hancock said he met most of them through alumni activities he helped organize.

"There were just three of them that stayed in Villa Grove to spend the rest of their lives," he said. "The rest went out across the country."

The state championship was the pride of the town for generations. They still frequently talked about "the team" when he was growing up, Hancock said.

Hancock said the alumni association recently had a banner made to hang in the school gym to remind younger generations of the 1923 victory.

"Villa Grove was the smallest school in the state to win the state tournament until 1952 when Hebron won," he said.

Hancock said in 1922 Villa Grove's baseball team, also coached by Pulliam, won state.

The best thing about Villa Grove

Hancock said growing up in Villa Grove he was fascinated by the roundhouse and the whole railroad scene. He remembers lots of troop trains going through town in World War II, and the passenger trains often carried the major league baseball teams that were coming and going between Chicago and St. Louis.

"As a young boy I used to go down and collect autographs from some of the major league players," he said. "Mel Ott, a New York Giant, and their manager, Bill Terry, are two I remember, and there were others."

The fascination with the railroads might have been why he spent 20 years working as a conductor. And yes, he said, he still has the pocket watch he used during those days.

He's always been content living in Villa Grove and never thought about leaving. Sure, there have been floods through the years. The Embarras River frequently spills into town, but Knox said most of the houses in the flood plain were removed. He said the media gets more excited about the flooding than the residents, who know what to expect after all these years.

John Leon, who moved to Villa Grove as a young man to be an optometrist, said from Day 1 he never felt like an outsider. He served as mayor and alderman for a total of 36 years.

Two of the best assets the town has to offer is its good school system, Leon said, and the ability to appeal to people of just about any religion. The town has churches for Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Christians, Pentecostals and members of Crossroads Fellowship.

"I've never thought about leaving," said Leon, who retired in 2001. "It's a town that if someone's in trouble, why, the town helps," he said. "If someone's house burns or something, people will come up with donations of money or whatever it takes. They're really good people."

Jones said the best part about Villa Grove is "being able to walk down the street and feel safe and be greeted by your friends and neighbors and relatives."

Knox is more succinct.

"It's a little town," he said. "The closest thing to Mayberry there is."