Bill Ranger & Sons

About Bill Ranger & Sons

There is an hour in Gillespie when the prairie is one long blue sheet and nothing moves but the wind coming off Gillespie Lake. That is the hour Bill Ranger & Sons is already awake, blade down, cutting the first clean line up a Macoupin County driveway. Snow arrives here with room to run — no hills to slow it, just open field after open field feeding it straight onto the pavement — so the work is plowing, scraping lots down to the surface, opening walkways, and laying salt where the wind will try again by noon. The reward is small and exact: someone steps out at seven and the way to the road is already dark and dry. Around Gillespie, Benld, Wilsonville and Mount Olive, that is the thing worth being known for — being finished before the town wakes up.