Is Mahomet a Small Town?

Not much occurs in Mahomet, Illinois, without quickly being followed by comments such as “if that happens, Mahomet will no longer be a small town¹” (or its backward-looking variant, “because that happened, Mahomet is no longer a small town”). This “small town” lens is given much weight in evaluating the topics of the day, but its meaning is given little critical attention. This post is an effort toward remedying that.

A Tale of Two Moves

When I first moved to Mahomet as a kid in the late eighties, we came from a city² of about 7,200 people in north-central Illinois. At that time, the Village of Mahomet still had fewer than 3,000³ people. It seemed I moved to a small town.

When I moved back a couple years ago, we came from a Chicago suburb of about 80,000. At that time, the Village of Mahomet had around 10,000 people.⁴ Again, it seemed I moved to a small town.

But did I really? What if until recently I had stayed in that slow-growing north-central Illinois city (current population of about 7,800) and then moved to Mahomet? Or what if I’d moved to Mahomet in the late 80s and never left? Would today’s Mahomet of over 10,000 people seem small to me in either case? Likely not.

Did I actually move to a small town in the first place when I came to Mahomet in the back in the late 80s? Someone who had been here since the 70s at that time would have said “no” — the population had doubled in the prior 15 years. Mahomet also would not have seemed small to me if I’d come here in the 80s from an even smaller town.

All of this is because the description of Mahomet as “small” does not actually tell us anything about Mahomet. “Small” is an inherently comparative term (i.e., small as compared to what?). What the description of Mahomet as “small” tells us is how Mahomet’s size relates to the describer’s frame of reference.⁵ For long-term residents, that frame of reference tends to be Mahomet’s population when they arrived.⁶ Twenty years from now, when our Village population is approaching 20,000, Mahomet won’t seem small to those who are moving here (or living here) today.

Population Boom

20,000 in 20 years? Perhaps that number is a bit high, but it isn’t as crazy as it might sound. Since the 1970 Census, the Village of Mahomet has doubled in population every 15 to 20 years (see the chart below or the raw census data on Wikipedia).⁷ Growth has slowed slightly over that period, and that slowing likely will continue. However, the Village of Mahomet already has well over 10,000 people, and there seems no reason to expect the growth trends of the past 55 years to change in the coming decades.

Population of the Village of Mahomet

It can be difficult to grasp how unusual Mahomet’s growth has been over the past fifty years or so. There are few if any comparable municipalities in Illinois, which makes the analysis of some local issues, such as schools, particularly tricky.⁸

As an example, Monticello, a healthy and growing nearby town, draws comparisons to Mahomet from time to time. But the City of Monticello has experienced growth of “only” 44% from 1970 to 2020, while the Village of Mahomet has experienced growth of 628% over that fifty-year period — more than an order of magnitude higher. Put another way, in 1970 Monticello was more than 3 times larger than Mahomet. As of 2023, Mahomet was 1.7 times the size of Monticello. What Mahomet has done (and needs to do) to accommodate that growth is inevitably and dramatically different from Monticello’s experience.

For those who prefer to think in spatial terms, below is a map of the current Village of Mahomet boundaries (in pink) overlaying a satellite image of the Village from 1973 (source: Champaign County GIS). Of course, not all the land within the current Village boundaries is developed even in 2024 (and some developed areas shown here as within the current boundaries were not within the 1973 boundaries). Still, this map is a good visual representation of how significantly the town has grown.⁹

2025 Mahomet Boundaries Over 1973 Aerial Photo

In 1973, development is almost non-existent to the south of 150, as well as in the area located east of the river and south of I-74. To the north of town, the then-unannexed Briarcliff has only a few houses, and Thornewood won’t be started for decades. There is little development west of what was then the High School (and is now the Junior High). Anyone who has lived here at any point during the past 50 years has witnessed this expansion firsthand.

Let it Grow?

It is wonderful that we can see in Mahomet certain characteristics sometimes associated with smallness — friendly people, a tight-knit community, a vibrant downtown, etc. Those are all great attributes, and we should continue to encourage them. They aren’t actually caused by a small population though.¹⁰

The truth is that at no time in the past five decades has actual smallness of population been a defining feature of Mahomet; rather, the defining feature of Mahomet over that period has been and remains rapid population growth due to the desirability of our town. If you moved here during that period, Mahomet may have seemed small to you upon your arrival, as it did for me, but it probably no longer does. No one who has moved here since the mid-70s could have done so with a reasonable expectation of continued smallness.¹¹

Growth isn’t necessarily good (or bad), but it has been and is inevitable here. To expect otherwise simply is not realistic based on our history, our location, and our continued desirability. To define small as good and growth as bad while residing in Mahomet is to set oneself up for disappointment. It is also unproductive — in terms of municipal planning, that perspective is an obstacle to the serious task of guiding our future growth toward the best possible results for our Village.¹² Let’s set aside the distorting lens of “smallness” and focus on the work of ensuring that Mahomet — regardless of its size — remains a great place to be.

---

1. For convenience, I use the word “town” in the colloquial sense in this post, to mean something like community or municipality. “Town” does have a technical meaning in Illinois as a form of government still used by a handful of pre-1870 municipalities (the Town of Normal being the local example), but that isn’t the meaning intended here.

2. I use the words “city” and “village” in this post in the technical sense, which (perhaps counterintuitively) has almost nothing to do with population (except that to incorporate a new city generally requires a minimum of 2,500 people). Rather, “city” and “village” describe different forms of municipal government permitted under Illinois law. According to Census data, Illinois has villages in excess of 70,000 people (Arlington Heights, Bolingbrook, Schaumburg) and a couple dozen cities with fewer than 1,000 people (the smallest being Nason, in Jefferson County, with only 199 people). “Village” is not indicative of smallness.

3. All Mahomet population numbers in this post refer to the population of the Village of Mahomet (i.e., excluding population in adjacent unincorporated portions of the County). That’s because Village numbers are easily findable from Census data. This does result in an oversimplification though — the Mahomet area has an unusually large (as compared to similar municipalities) number of residential subdivisions and residents located outside of the Village. Some of those predate 1970 and some were built later (although it seems the Village, by exercise of its extraterritorial jurisdiction, generally has disallowed this practice over the past few decades). See the map later in this post.

4. I realize our population signs at the edge of town still say 9,400, but that is the 2020 Census number. Current census data reflect an estimated 2023 Village population of 10,273. For many years, due to the growth rate outlined in this post, Mahomet population signs have been outdated before they are posted.

5. Renowned small-town expert John Mellencamp presumably would consider Mahomet small even today based on his frame of reference. His hometown of Seymour, Indiana had a population of just under 10,000 when he was born in 1951. That Seymour now has a population of over 21,000. It is unclear whether Mr. Mellencamp still considers it small.

6. To return to my examples above, both of my moves here seemed to be moves to a small town only because my frame of reference had changed more than Mahomet itself had grown. That is a pretty unusual experience.

7. The completion of I-74 from Champaign to the Prairieview exit in 1967, and to the Route 47 exit a few years later, were watershed moments in Mahomet’s history and catalysts for the rapid growth we’ve had ever since.

8. There are a few Illinois municipalities that do exhibit similar (or even faster) growth, but they tend to be dissimilar to Mahomet in other ways. Generally, their rapid growth started by being adjacent to a larger municipality, and they tend to lack Mahomet’s substantial history as an independent town. Examples include various outer Chicago suburbs. Locally, Savoy fits into this group (though on a smaller scale), a key difference in that case being Savoy’s not having its own school district.

9. Village population growth over the past decade or so includes a handful of annexations of existing developed subdivisions (e.g., Briarcliff). There remain numerous unannexed subdivisions. While unlikely to have a significant impact on the numbers, future Village growth will be slowed or accelerated somewhat depending on how many of these subdivisions are annexed over the coming years. Those population increases don’t change the actual number of area residents though and shouldn’t have any impact on perceived “smallness” or lack thereof.

10. The increased population actually has been great for our downtown, which is far livelier now than it was 30 years ago.

11. There are plenty of places where a person could have a reasonable expectation of continued smallness (whatever “small” might mean to the person in question). That city in north-central Illinois where I lived in the early 80s would be a fine example. Closer to home, so would Mansfield and Farmer City. Mahomet is not such a place.

12. To acknowledge the inevitability of further residential growth is not to say that the Village should be entirely laissez faire in that regard. Rather, the Village should take an active hand in influencing the nature of that growth — in particular, by determining and seeking the types of residential developments that provide maximum benefit and minimum additional burden to our school district. More broadly speaking, the desirability of Mahomet gives the Village a lot of leverage in dealing with residential developers, and the Village should use it.