Country View Estates

So I found something cool, these are the electric plans for a subdivision my mom developed in the 70’s, on one of our family farms. The plans were based on the site plan I drew for Country View Estates.
 

As the story goes, my mom went to a local surveyor/engineer to get a site plan drawn. The engineer quoted $1,000 for a site plan in 1976. My mom felt the engineer was trying to rip her off because she was a woman (hmmm, good call mom! It was a $100 job. I am grateful for a lot of amazingly trail blazing women in my family, including great grandmothers, grandmothers, aunt………). She said, point blank to the engineer, “my 12 year old could draw that for free”. The engineer said to her, “have your son draw it with dimensions and square footages for each lot, if it works, I’ll draw the plat for free.” The Engineer had set a trap for mom, he had counted on the fact that I would not be able to figure out the lot square footages on the lots with radius’s. WRONG😂 I had the geometry nailed!
 

Well the engineer ended up eating his words and drew the plat for free. Site plan is not bad for a 12 year old!
 

 ……and Country View Estates today, in the comment below. I guess I have a successful land development track record, since I was 12 years old. 😂
 

My favorite part of the story, the engineer was a friend of my dad’s. My dad had passed away a few months before this. Apparently, the engineer displayed the site plan in his office, with a simple message, “never bet against a Fluegel, even if it’s the 12 year old.” 😂
 

Now for the rest of the story, when mom came to me and asked me to draw the site plan, I had already been working on it. I was already furiously working on figuring out the geometry! I showed mom the layout and we debated some elements. When the plat went to County Commission, mom made me present it at the public hearing, it got approved.
 

So fast forward to when I was an Urban Planning student at University of Illinois, my academic advisor was an old school Cherokee Indian land use and environmental law attorney. Clyde was very protective of me, because a lot of the other professors thought I was only using the urban planning program to become a real estate developer. Clyde knew me better and protected me from the views of some professors. He understoood that I was thoughtful enough to know where an old Indian burial ground was on our farm and to call it out as an “Exception”. He understood that I was very curious about environmentally integrated design and strived to learn how to balance man and nature. Most importantly, Clyde taught me about creating the “Sense of Place” in urban planning, i.e. the destination wherein people socialize and really create a community!

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