On February 18, 1993, Bondi made the following speech, inspired by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Noon Rotary Club of Galesburg, in an effort to fire up the community on some projects.
The Galesburg Address, inspired a group of 11 citizens to envision plans to develop a community welcome/visitor’s center on East Main Street, created a national hall of fame for the railroad industry and developed a better local awareness around Carl Sandburg’s accomplishments through a spring festival in his honor.
The Galesburg Address
Seven score and 16 years ago, George Gale and followers came forth to this frontier, a pre-civil war city conceived in education and dedicated to the proposition that all business opportunities were created equal. We are met in a great assembly of those great great grandchildren. We come each week to dedicate that principle, as a test for those who here inspire, that that idea might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - thus we must investigate this ground. Galesburg’s founding fathers, living and dead, who worked here, have already visioned; far greater than us.
The region will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but without new vision, we will forget what they did here. It is for us, to be dedicated to the unfinished work, which they who started here, have thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these visions - we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave—that we here highly resolve that these dreams shall not die—that this community, shall have a new birth of growth and commerce—and that development of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not stop in Galesburg.
February 18, 1993
