By Robert Themer
Town & Country editor
ATLANTA, ILL. -- A small town with a big-town name, Atlanta, Illinois, seems to be making the biggest deal it can from small-town traditions.
A town of 1,650 along Historic Route 66 about 20 miles southwest of Bloomington, it seems to become more historic year by year.
The area claims a number of Abe Lincoln connections, having been on his route when he as a circuit riding country lawyer. There's the Carriage Shed where he stayed with the Hoblit family and the Atlanta-Eminence Community Memorial Building where he attended a 4th of July celebration in 1859, the year before he was elected president.
The octagonal Atlanta library building is a Carnigie-funded gem from 1908, with classic proportions, high ceilings and narrow windows, a domed rotunda and solid oak woodwork. Its clock tower stands sentinel along Old Route 66, which cuts through Atlanta on the east side.
Diagonally across the intersection is a newly-restored piece of Americana -- a grocery store advertisement painted in bright colors on the side of a red brick building owned by Bill Thomas, a 19-year Atlanta resident who heads a couple of local historic efforts.
The A-Team, an economic development group that he leads, welcomed sign painters -- walldogs and letterheads -- to town from all over the country for the first-ever "Firecracker Walldog Jam" a couple weekends ago.
The wall painting is over for this year, but Thomas has already scheduled a meeting "with the letterheads to start planning for next year's event."
Right across the street is Atlanta Route 66 Park, a corner courtyard of the old business district, that is bordered by a two-story building to the west. "We want to put a big mural on that wall," Thomas said.
West across the railroad is the J.H. Hawes Grain Elevator and Agricultural Museum, which is "in essence a fully operational turn of the 20th century grain elevator," said Thomas, who also is chairman of the elevator board. "You can see how grain would have been delivered and handled, stored and shipped out during that time period.
"It is the only wooden grain elevator in Illinois that has been restored and is on the National Register and, as far as I can determine in my research, one of only three in the country on the National Register. This one is the only one that is a museum."
The museum is open 1-3 Sundays June through August. Special tours can be scheduled by phoning (217) 648-5077 or 648-2056. "At the beginning of the summer we celebrate the elevator's birthday," he said. "We bring in a team of horses and wagon and we fire up the engine" (a 1920 single-cylinder Fairbanks-Morse gas engine that runs the conveyors).
The elevator was in continuous operation until 1976, with "only three modifications made to it" he said, "So it is essentially what it was in 1904. It's just the most incredibly designed thing, so ingenious and simple, but it does what it is supposed to do."
It almost was destroyed. "After it closed down, it was abandoned and about 1988 or so the city took it over and they were going to give it to the fire department to burn down as a practice exercise," Thomas said. "That's when some people stepped in and said no lets do something other than burn it down."
It took them 11 years from that point to get it opened to the public as a museum.
Atlanta has "an awful lot of folks coming through simply by being on Route 66," Thomas said. Two weeks ago, French visitors making a Route 66 road trip in 40 antique Citroen cars stopped in Atlanta.
The tour was intended to stimulate tourism in the wake of the September 11 attacks and to thank Americans who served in World War II. Atlanta got about 100 area veterans together for a ceremony honoring them.