~a column about Jefferson by Colleen O’Brien
You’d think we’d found shamrocks all over the ground or oil underneath, for the boom going on in Jefferson is everywhere apparent, drawing ideas and energy.
The casino folks have broken ground; the hospital addition is far advanced; and soon the Hy Vee will get back to its plan for a grocery store near downtown.
Construction is always the sign of progress, and when a boom comes along it is construction that has to flourish first: buildings for the boom, you know. In Jefferson, rather than shale oil or fracking fueling the boom, our boom is a variety of businesses developed initially by the Main Street program and moving along now on its own, gathering impetus. America’s middle name is business as President Calvin Coolidge so rightly told us (“The chief business of the American people is business,” he said to a bunch of newspaper editors in 1925.)
The boom draws workers, of course, the construction crews, the engineers and designers, and then it seems to draw onlookers and sightseers and the idea that maybe another new business – perhaps a Subway, a coffee house or two, a dress store that decides to stick around, a drive-in that reopens.
The sense of vibrancy in town is pleasing to most of us, energizing in a way that mysteriously brings more people in. It draws even fuddy-duddies and naysayers downtown for Hot August Night, for example; a truly hot/hot event that has cars of all ages rolling into town along w/ folks from near and far trying to find a place to park so they can wax nostalgic about ’56 Chevys.
My friend wondered why she couldn’t get a ride in one, and I thought, Well, it’s Jefferson 2014: think it and it will happen. By next year’s auto night on the square, we’ll probably be lining up for a ride in our favorite vintage, scoopin’ the loop out to the A&W.
A couple of visitors to Jefferson have said things to me that do my favorite town up proud.
A visitor named Lou said what most people say and have always said about Jefferson, boom or not: “It’s nice, it’s pretty. The houses and yards are kept up and neat.” She added, “There’s a feeling of something, like things are happening.” Since she comes from a Kansas town of about 300, maybe just the sheer numbers of a town of 4,500 seem invigorating, but I think it is in fact a new spirit of boom and flourish
“The town square is amazing,” said Sherri of Atlantic, Iowa. “The little shops, all with friendly people!” (Does this mean Atlantic, a town of 7,000 or so, is less friendly? Probably not, but it’s nice to hear it about Jefferson business folks on the square.)
“That woodworking place [RVP~1875 Historical Furniture Shop and Museum/Raccoon River Artisan Colony] with a theater for live plays!” Sherri exclaimed. “Who woulda thought?” (Actually, Sherri, not even we could have imagined it before the fact. It seems that owner Robby Pedersen is simply widely entrepreneurial in very creative ways.)
Sherri was so happy with Jefferson she returned two weeks later. “My friend had talked about a bell tower festival, but I never really connected it with the fact that there had to be a bell tower,” she said. “I went up in it and those volunteers gave us so much information on what we were seeing. So we toured the whole town.”
What initially brought this gal to town was the bike trail. “Where I live I have to load up my bike on my car and drive to a bike trail,” she said. “My friend here just gets on her bike and within a minute she’s on the trail. All my life I’ve ridden my bike, and I just think it would be cool to live that close to a bike trail.”
So, it appears to me that the boom and busyness of Jeff right now is a magnet for all kinds of energy coming to town, some of it to build the boom, some of it to take advantage of what the boom is – new businesses as well as old ones remade, a happy attitude, a well-kept landscape. It’s a kind of zeitgeist, a spirit of the time, energy attracting energy that is Jefferson in the second decade of the 21st century; perhaps like it was in the second decade of the 20th century, when Jefferson was, as the historians have written, at its peak. Seems we’re peaking again.
Good for us.
