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Christmas comes early to local towns on Saturday By JEFF LAMPE
Santa Claus will be a busy guy this Saturday. In the span of one day, Santa will make appearances in Brimfield, Elmwood and Princeville as each community holds its own version of an annual pre-Christmas townwide festival. A variety of holiday-related activities will be held locally, with everything from dulcimers to gingerbread cookies available. Here’s a look at some highlights of what looks to be a very busy day, with weather forecast to be perfect for Weekly Post Staff Writer
this time of year. Brimfield – Brimfield’s Area Christmas Walk is Saturday starting with a soup supper at the Brimfield Fire station from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. After that, businesses will be open from 5-7 and will offer bargains and goodies. Several businesses are having unique promotions, including an Ugly Sweater Contest being sponsored at Sherman’s Pharmacy. Other activities during the evening will include performances by the Brimfield High School band and chorus, Barnyard Discoveries
at Larson Insurance, a giant fire pit near the Village Hall that includes a second source of warmth in the form of hot chocolate, hay-rack rides through town, a scavenger hunt, an old-fashioned Christmas at the Guyer Log Cabin (complete with dulcimer music) and Santa at the Brimfield Public Library (bring your cameras and your kids). The library is also organizing a variety of crafts for adults and children. And just down the street, lit with holiday decorations of all sorts, Burnzees will have gingerbread cookies to decorate and will Continued on Page 2
Christmas lights abound in Elmwood’s Central Park and the vacant corner lot in town.
With snow comes salt on roads ... and everywhere
FARMINGTON LIBRARY
Encouraging lifelong learning and literacy
By BILL KNIGHT For The Weekly Post
By NANCY DAVIS
FARMINGTON – “Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest,” said Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady. That is how John Howard, library director, envisions the mission of the Farmington Library. “We want to encourage lifelong learning,” Howard said. “Our programs and services promote literacy at all age levels. We build a better community when our populace is educated.” When the Farmington Area Public Library selected a site for its new library in 2014, they chose to construct it across the street from the
As winter approaches, crews are preparing to clear snowy streets and roads so people can travel safely and get to work. However, the main tool is road salt, which dissolves in water and runs off into ditches and lakes, streams and sewage-treatment plants, potentially affecting animals, plants and grasses. Inside “Our drivers are al• What do stymied ready lined up for the voters do? Page 5. winter,” said Kickapoo • Princeville schools Township Road Comlower tax rate. Page 9. missioner Dan Kelch, who added, “We keep an • Brimfield man guilty of concealing updated fleet of equipassets in. bankruptcy ment, with our oldest case. Page 17. truck being a 2011 and the newest a 2017, along with a 2016 Cat endloader mounted with a huge plow for subdivision plowing.” Relatively cheap and effective, road salt was first used in 1938. It lowers the freezing point, so snow melts until temperatures drop to, say, 0 degrees instead of 32 degrees, before freezing. Illinois was one of the states examined in studies showing road salt cuts snowstorm wrecks by 88 Continued on Page 8
For The Weekly Post
The Farmington Library has a welcoming area for youth to sit and peruse books or to study. Photo by Nancy Davis.
school at 411 N. Lightfoot Road. That location strengthened the partnership between the school and the library and increased its accessibility to the community. Since that time, use of the library and the number of cardholders has jumped every year as interest in their resources and services has grown. Prior to moving to its current lo-
cation, the library had been in the same building on East Fort Street since 1907, built with a grant from Andrew Carnegie. As library services and the community changed, the building could no longer meet the need, and could not be expanded or made accessible. The library board was able to take advantage of Continued on Page 10