When Dale Fowler won his Illinois Senate seat in 2016 during a Republican sweep across southern Illinois, he called his old high school football coach — the man who had nicknamed him “Senator” years earlier.
“He said, ‘I don’t know, man. I just saw it in you,’” Fowler recalled in an October interview with Capitol News Illinois, still sounding a little surprised by how far this “country boy” — his words — had come in life.
Fowler, 68, who has long enjoyed broad bipartisan popularity in his rural corner of the state announced last summer that he would not seek re-election this year. At the time, Fowler said he was honoring a self-imposed 10-year term limit pledge he made during his first campaign.
On Tuesday, Fowler, the Harrisburg Republican who represents District 59, announced in a statement he plans to leave the position upon adjournment of the spring legislative session, scheduled for Sunday, May 31. He did not give a specific reason for stepping down seven months early, beyond saying he had promised upon election to give the job all he had and to “know when the time was right to step away.”
The decision comes as Fowler’s largest recent campaign donors — Harrisburg businessmen who own a company that did millions of dollars of construction work for regional schools, and whose failed housing project Fowler promoted in Cairo — has been under FBI investigation for months, though no arrests or charges have been made public and the company owners deny wrongdoing.
Fowler said he has not been approached by federal agents and, though he has known the owners for years, has had no involvement in their business affairs. The FBI declined to comment on the investigation.
Humble beginnings
Fowler’s rise to the Illinois Senate was improbable by his own telling. He grew up on a farm outside Eldorado in rural Saline County, driving tractors as a teenager and hauling hay in the summers. In his early 20s, he took over his father’s meatpacking plant and expanded the business into deer processing. His venison sausage quickly became a regional staple sold at hunting checkpoints and grocery stores across southern Illinois.
For a while, he believed he would spend the rest of his life running the family business. But Fowler was restless and ambitious. After selling the plant, he moved through a series of state government jobs, and later went into banking, living out a childhood dream when he accepted a job as the business development officer for the regional chain People’s National Bank.
He was appointed to the Harrisburg City Council in 2012, became mayor after the death of Mayor Ron Crank, then won election to a full term in 2015. A year later, Fowler defeated longtime Democratic incumbent Gary Forby, of Benton, for the Illinois Senate seat.
Despite rising to become Assistant Republican Leader in the Senate — a role that has allowed him to help shape priorities for the chamber’s minority party — Fowler often resisted the image of a career politician.
In that October interview with CNI, Fowler said he wanted people to know he’s “just Dale that grew up on a farm.”
“I became a state senator,” he said. “If I can do it, you can do it.”
During his years in office, he prioritized economic development, trying to combat the region’s long struggle to hold onto jobs, population and identity as coal mines and factories shuttered, and Southern Illinois University shrank alongside the region itself. His Senate district stretches from Cairo northward along Illinois’ southeastern border with Indiana and encompasses some of the state’s poorest communities.
To accomplish his goals in increasingly hard-right southern Illinois, Fowler often reached across the aisle, earning support and goodwill beyond his party from statewide Democrats — including Gov. JB Pritzker and Comptroller Susana Mendoza — as well as community leaders who viewed him as a pragmatic advocate for the region.
“The bottom line about Dale is he wanted to see the final results get done of whatever he was working on, no matter what it took, including reaching across the aisle,” said Brent Gentry, a Democrat from Carterville who served on the Williamon County Board for 18 years through 2022. “If people would do this all across this nation, we’d be in a lot better shape.”
That approach was especially evident in Cairo, the historic Black city at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at the state’s southern tip, where Fowler spent years pushing redevelopment and efforts and trying to draw state attention to the struggling community.
His push for redevelopment there included a long-stalled port project that eventually secured roughly $40 million in state support under Pritzker, though development has proceeded slowly. Fowler also championed housing redevelopment in the city after several large public housing complexes fell into disrepair and were razed, hollowing out the town.
In early 2023, he helped connect local leaders with a Harrisburg-based 3D-printing company that proposed building affordable homes in Cairo using concrete-printing technology.
The effort generated substantial publicity but never expanded further. The owners said cracks in the one duplex they printed, a donated gift to the city, forced them to halt interior work, though they pledged to finish the project by the end of October. Nearly two years after a groundbreaking ceremony for what was billed as eventual plans for 30 duplexes on two vacant lots, the lone duplex still sits unfinished.
The company behind the 3D-printing project, Prestige Project Management and its suite of sister companies, later became the subject of an FBI investigation led by an agent in Marion who specializes in fraud and white-collar corruption cases. In addition to subpoenas to Prestige for its business records, the FBI has also subpoenaed at least two school districts and the city of Harrisburg for their contracts with and payments to Prestige for work unrelated to the duplex project, according to records obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
Fowler previously said he does not believe they engaged in wrongdoing. “Are they grabbing for straws?” he said of the FBI in the October interview. Fowler did not report on his annual economic disclosure form that Prestige paid for him to attend a concrete expo in Las Vegas in January 2024, though amended the form after Capitol News Illinois asked him about it last year.
Since its founding in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations outside political action committees and party organizations. The company gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. Its final donation of $6,500 came five days after the groundbreaking celebration for the 3D-printed duplex.
Fowler said he does not track who donates to his campaign; he and one of the company owners said the contribution was tied to a golf fundraiser held two months earlier.
In the news release announcing his departure, Fowler did not mention the Cairo housing or port projects he helped champion. Instead, he highlighted initiatives that had succeeded, including helping bring Walker’s Bluff Casino Resort to southern Illinois, championing the SI Treasures tourism initiative, and supporting the state’s first-ever STAR bonds project, which helped pave the way for the Oasis Powersports and Family Entertainment Center in and near the Marion mall.
State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Metropolis, said it had been an honor to serve alongside Fowler, calling him a “champion for economic development” who has “worked tirelessly to promote our region.”
Fowler often spoke not about legislation he passed, but about his charitable work, including founding Clothes for Southern Illinois Kids in 2001, followed by Heaven’s Kitchen in 2018, initiatives he funds through his charity, the Fowler-Bonan Foundation.
“God gave me that memory of that little brother and sister from Eldorado, Illinois, out in the country that rode the school bus with me. Every single day of school, they would come running out of a somewhat dilapidated home wearing tattered clothes,” he said, adding that the children were bullied in school because of it.
Mostly, though, Fowler speaks with a fiery passion for southern Illinois.
“I have been truly blessed to serve the people of southern Illinois in the Senate,” Fowler said in his statement announcing his resignation. “This has never been about a title for me. It has always been about the people, the communities, and the opportunity to make a difference for the region I call home.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.