Ask residents for one illustrative word about the Fox Valley today. One answer will be heard most often: growth.

Village and school boards routinely wrestle with the question. Residents fill those meeting halls to voice their concerns about the effects of growth, often trying to block it.

But growth has come to the Fox Valley and continues to. Pastoral farm towns outside of Elgin have become suburbs of Chicago.

More than 40 years ago, one developer saw the Fox Valley's potential to lure people out of Chicago and aggressively pursued it.

Leonard W. Besinger, a builder of who plied his trade in Chicago and its nearby suburbs, owned a 200-acre farm north of Carpentersville called Meadowdale, where he raised hackney show ponies.

A fire destroyed the stables in 1949. Besinger rebuilt, but another fire destroyed the stables again two years later. Besinger then gave up on the idea of the horse farm, but a new one soon germinated in his head.

"The man is a builder, and he's got land," said Leonard W. Besinger Jr., who joined his father in developing the Meadowdale subdivision in 1963. "When a builder has land, he builds houses on it."

Besinger would draw people out of Chicago by building a self-sufficient town, complete with its own schools, churches and the Meadowdale Shopping Center, which still stands today.

The one farm was not enough for the town he wanted to build, so Besinger began buying more land, eventually winding up with about 2,700 acres, Leonard Besinger Jr. said.

"The people that came out from the city thought they were moving out to the country," said Marge Edwards, president of the Dundee Township Historical Society. "And it was the country, but it has just grown continuously from then. And there is a boom now.

"The timing was right. The war (World War II) was over. The economy was improving, and I think people were looking for something better."

Besinger built affordable, prefabricated houses and marketed them to veterans through low interest loan provided through the G.I. Bill, which often allow a purchase with no money down.

"Back then, you had to put 25 percent down," Leonard W. Besinger Jr. said. "We started out (selling) at $11,300, then switched to $9,400 for a two-bedroom house. A three-bedroom was still under $10,000."

But, much like today, there was resistance to expansion. Opponents went so far as to found a town called Middlebury to hem in Meadowdale. Besinger never realized his dream of founding a new town, but he forged ahead in 1953, eventually annexing his subdivision into the village of Carpentersville.

Despite the protests, the people came to Meadowdale. And they came in droves, overwhelming the opposition.

In 1950, Carpentersville's population was 1,523. Ten years later, it was 17,424. In 1970, 24,059 people were calling Carpentersville home.

The dam had broken. The Fox Valley continued to grow, but the residential flood triggered by Meadowdale eventually slowed to a trickle - until recent years.

While development is nothing new the Fox Valley, it has picked up dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years, said Marc Thomas, senior planner with the Northeastern Illinois Planing Commission.

"The ring of sprawl between '80 and '90 was in DuPage County," Thomas said. "Now, DuPage is developed. Northwest Cook County is pretty much developed. As construction reaches out further and further in our region, the Fox Valley is right smack in the middle of it."

The highest jumps in population have been in the southeastern corner of McHenry County in Algonquin, Crystal Lake and Lake in the Hills, which has earned the moniker of the 5th fastest-growing community with more than 10,000 people. Lake in the Hills' population shot up by nearly 250 percent, from 5,882 to 20,417, between 1990 and 1998.

Lake in the Hills is projected to grow by about another 10,000 people by 2020, Algonquin another 18,000 and is expect to double its population to 62,000, Thomas said.

The Thornwood subdivision under construction in South Elgin is expected to change the face of the face of the village by adding about 2,500 people to the nearly 14,000 already living there.

Thornwood, like so many other developments, met with resistance from residents, but it has calmed down since the subdivision was approved and building has begun, said Hugh Smeed, vice president of Marketing for Crown Community Development, Thornwood's developer.

"People love living out here," Smeed said. "The Fox Valley's time has come. It's a very popular place to be.

"The only thing I'm always confused about is when people say, `We don't want new development here.' There do they expect their children to build a house? It's beyond me. I know people don't want things to be different, but they really need to think about their own children, as well as their neighbors' children."

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