PEORIA MAGAZINE March 2022

L ook around Delavan, this quiet Tazewell County community of 1,600 people, and on the surface, it appears to be your typical, worn-out small town, complete with 19th-century architecture and empty storefronts. This, of course, is also the town that produced Greta Alexander, the nationally known psychic who drew celebrities such as soap opera star Ruth Warrick (“All My Children’s” Phoebe Tyler) to the Midwest for personal consultations. It’s a town where controversy raged in the 1970s and 1980s over the Del-Van Theater, an adult movie house. It’s a town that in the 21st century, developed a very different type of drawing card, at least for a time —Libby Mathers’ Harvest Café, a farm-to-table restaurant that operated successfully until Mathers’ untimely death in 2019. Today, amid the corn and soybean fields that have long surrounded the town, Delavan benefits from a new cash crop. As one of the first communities in Illinois to establish a cannabis facility, Delavan has been home to Chicago-based Revolution Global since 2015. The company’s 75,000 square-foot facility sits innocuously on the eastern edge of Delavan, where it produces medical marijuana, with plans to expand given the state’s 2020 approval for the sale of recreational marijuana. Pot is a hit in Illinois, with sales topping $1.2 billion in 2021. The state now gets more tax revenue from marijuana than from alcohol. And little Delavan is a growing part of that big-picture plan. A las, the acceptance wasn’t immediate. Liz Skinner, Delavan’s mayor since 2008, recalled the first economic development meeting when the idea was floated to host a cannabis plant. “No one said a word,” she recalls. “I think back and a kneejerk reaction could have been to say ‘no way.’ This is a small, conservative community.” In fact, in something of an ironic side note, it’s a community that derives its very name from Edward C. Delavan, a well known 19th century temperance advocate. Eric Diekhoff, whose family has farmed

C O M M U N I T Y S P O T L I G H T

Are urban and rural growth producing a grass-fed ‘baby Galena’? DELAVAN RISING

BY STEVE TARTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY RON JOHNSON

62 MARCH 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE