By Joseph Mesa
Contributing Writer

Coming off successful community celebrations that included the Mushroom Cap Half Marathon and Holiday Light Parade, Kennett Square Borough Council’s Dec. 8 meeting transitioned from celebrations to routine governance.

By a vote taken Monday night, council approved Resolution 2025-10, listed on the agenda as “Bontrager Walk Designation,” authorizing a commemorative sign to be installed on Birch Street in honor of local businessman and philanthropist Mike Bontrager. The resolution capped a year in which Bontrager was also awarded Kennett Township’s Medal of Merit for his role in shaping the region’s recent redevelopment and nonprofit landscape. Supporters pointed to Birch Street itself as the most visible argument for the honorary sign.

When Bontrager and his team at Square Roots Collective re-imagined the derelict former milk plant on Birch Street as The Creamery in 2016, the property had sat abandoned for years. In the decade since, The Creamery has become a regional destination—a beer garden and community gathering place that hosts concerts, art events and seasonal markets, including the Holiday Village Market that now anchors the town’s December calendar. Square Root’s own materials describe the Birch Street project as an effort to make the corridor “a place of art, culture, and community,” and emphasize that 100 percent of the profits from The Creamery, Artelo and its Birch Street real estate are directed to community nonprofits. Those efforts were recognized earlier this year when the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development awarded a $1 million Main Street Matters grant to stabilize and expand The Creamery. Bontrager’s broader impact extends beyond Birch Street. As founder of Chatham Financial, he built a global risk-management firm employing more than 750 people in offices across North America, Europe and Asia, including a major presence in Kennett Square. He launched Square Roots Collective, which has seeded or supported initiatives from the Kennett Creamery and Kennett Trails Alliance to Voices Underground and youth leadership and inclusion programs throughout southern Chester County.

Against that backdrop, some residents shared public comments that warned that naming a piece of the public realm after Bontrager while his projects are still expanding risks reinforcing a pattern in which wealth and influence buy visibility, while longtime public servants, Pulitzer Prize winners, volunteers, heroes, and grassroots organizers labor in relative obscurity.

Kennett Square Borough Council’s agenda overall reflected just how quickly Kennett is changing. In addition to the Bontrager Walk resolution, members reviewed condominium agreements and bid rankings for the sale of  portions of the borough complex at 600 S. Broad Street, an ongoing effort to reposition public property for private redevelopment. They also worked through the final draft of the 2026 budget and a proposed tax-rate increase, and considered special-event permits for next year’s slate of festivals, including Winterfest, the Memorial Day Parade and the Holiday Light Parade. What is clear is that Kennett’s rapid transformation is forcing the borough to have harder conversations about how it balances gratitude, accountability and equity. The Bontrager Walk sign will likely go up on Birch Street in the coming months. The addition of the sign will serve as a formal acknowledgment of Bontrager’s larger role in recent revitalization efforts, as Kennett Square enters another year of growth and municipal planning.