Area around Good Help Shrine seeing changes

The farming area around the shrine is changing already.

“If the rumors are right, it’s going to look like downtown Chicago pretty soon,” says Louie Gomand, who owns a farm adjacent to the shrine.

A farm stand on his property sells vegetables and water to visitors. A sunflower costs 50 cents and a gourd 35 cents. A handwritten sign reads “bus specials.” There’s a lot more traffic, he says, but he has no complaints.
Neither does Kelli Vissers, 34. She and her husband David, 38, own two buildings in Champion.

They have converted a small trailer into the mobile On the Way Café. Kelli Vissers said she hopes to cater meals for tourists and turn one of the buildings into a bed and breakfast and the other into a full-scale café.

Barb Cornette, 58, who grew up in the area and now helps run a dairy farm a couple miles from the shrine, says some residents have mixed feelings about its growing popularity.

“Traffic has increased tremendously,” she says. “Some of the area farmers that are retired want to sell their land ... for possibly a hotel, a restaurant. They’re looking for the gold mine, unfortunately,” she said.

For decades, Cornette says, the shrine was visited mostly by local people. “We felt like this was our chapel,” she says, “and now we have to share it with everybody — which is OK if they wouldn’t try to change it” by adding restaurants and other tourist accoutrements.

GB Gazette