ST. CHARLES, ILLINOIS: SMALL TOWN AMERICA

ST. CHARLES, ILLINOIS: SMALL TOWN AMERICA Story and photography by Eric Anderson
They dragged their way the 40 miles west from Chicago in their Conestogas, their prairie schooners, and their farm wagons in the year 1833, the panic of the Black Hawk War behind them. The Fox River poking its contented way across their path seemed as good a place as any to plant their roots. Indeed, four Native American tribes already had it as their home - but, in dismay, were already moving off at the white man's advance.
	The newcomers were Swedes and Lithuanians and Belgians, people of the land who knew Chicago was not for them. They called their new place Charleston but another community 200 miles to the south had pre-empted that homage to the British crown. Ignoring the fact that Lewis and Clark had left Missouri from a place with the same name they incorporated their town as St. Charles.
It grew into that microcosm of our nation, small town America.
	It has all the characteristics of the American Dream. A local millionaire, "Col." Baker who couldn't give enough of his inherited $20 million to the town he loved. A museum in a converted Texaco station poignantly displaying the stuff of local legends: photographs of the first settlers; a couple's best dress clothes; an American sailor's uniform, an old rocking chair that was part of the underground railroad; a football used in a minor game the town recalls proudly. It would be kitsch if it wasn't so touching - this is the heart of our nation where people go about their business paying taxes and not asking for government handouts, where they stop to help if a stranger has a flat tire, where we see America at its best and most human.

This is a town of human dimensions, small enough that you can get to know it well - and liking what you get to know. Its attractions include the Arcada Theatre still hosting live entertainment and movies as it did when it opened in 1926. Its history includes the final performance in vaudeville of George Burns and Gracie Allen and performances by the John Phillip Sousa Band and the Trapp Family Singers. People would drive all the way from Chicago to attend shows in those days. And a brief walk over the Main Street Bridge past its symbolic statues of the foxes surveying their river brought the visitors to the Hotel Baker that the Colonel built in 1928 at a cost of a million dollars. Baker's wealth had come, in the 1910s, partly from a fortune his family made selling barbed wire. At the Hotel Baker guests could stay for $2.50 a night and dance to the music of Tommy Dorsey or Louie Armstrong in the celebrated Rainbow Room. The oval dance floor with its columned balcony had a glass brick floor, one of only three in the world, below which 3,000 light bulbs could flash designs ranging from hearts and the American flag to shamrocks and Christmas trees.