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But soon after she joined Wilmington's Design Review Board, Chamberlain discovered that the town's "good-ole-buddy network" of businessmen and politicians isn't always grateful for fresh perspectives. Teaming up with a preservationist group led by two other outsiders--John Baskin, 56, a ruminative writer from South Carolina, and former Bostonian Hawley, whose Orange Frazer Press specializes in books about Ohio--Chamberlain became involved in a crusade to create a downtown shopping-and-entertainment zone. Mayor Eveland and the city council liked the idea, but never came up with a way to finance it. The activists also tried to persuade Eveland to join an innovative small-town renewal program called the National Main Street Center (see box), battled his plan to raze a historic downtown block to make room for a new City Hall, and fought to save a soaring Italianate school building from demolition--but they lost all those fights. The affable Eveland, 49, whose grandfather built many of Wilmington's most distinctive landmarks, ran the family construction business until it collapsed two years ago. Says Baskin: "Sometimes I think the mayor wants to tear down the town his grandfather built."
"We're not enthralled about ripping down old buildings," says Eveland, "but some have outlived their useful lives. What comes to mind when you think of Wilmington is the downtown--so maintaining it is terribly important." Eveland is negotiating with a developer who wants to build a downtown retail complex, but most of the commercial action has moved to Hamburger Alley, where prime acreage is controlled by a city councilman named Robert Raizk. Downtown's economy has been so precarious that local bankers wouldn't risk the money to turn a warehouse into Main Street's first upscale restaurant; a businessman in town had to come through with a private loan. New shops and a bookstore with its own cappuccino bar have moved in, but the bar and grill in Main Street's only hotel recently went belly-up, and the U.S. Postal Service, despite local opposition, is abandoning its grand downtown building for a big, automated facility on the strip.
Deciding that she didn't have the stomach for such battles, Leslie Chamberlain quit the Design Review Board and started looking for new challenges. She put her bed and breakfast up for sale and enrolled in a landscape-architecture course at Ohio State. After she gets her degree, she and Rick plan to move the family to Nantucket, Mass., where preservationists tend to win their battles. "I tell people that Wilmington's getting just a little too big for me," says Leslie, her perfect smile firmly in place.
SCHOOL WARS
Because Marcy Hawley is not only a preservationist but a parent as well, with a 16-year-old son at Wilmington High, the thin, cerebral publisher, who is married to the town's Presbyterian minister, has become a reluctant crusader for school reform. Serving on the local school system's Multicultural Advisory Board, she and other newcomers have been pushing for racial-sensitivity training and a minority-hiring program because the system, despite growing numbers of black, Hispanic, Japanese and Native American students, has just one nonwhite teacher.