MCHS Rss feed -News & Events

Annual favorite: the Perkins Players performers, circa 2015.

From Museum Opener May 1st

Coventry farmstead protected

A large crowd was on hand Tuesday night, April 14, for the third of four Sampler Series programs at the McHenry County Historical Society Museum. With the help of the McHenry County Civil War Roundtable the Society marked the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination.
Horace White, reporter and former editor of the Chicago Tribune and New York Evening Post, wrote this introduction in February 1892 for William Herndon’s book, “Herndon’s Lincoln:”

About 85 members viewed the private collections

Focuses on the Standard School Program in Illinois

A Musical History of McHenry County." presented by Speaker Mary Ellen Heelan, of Cary.

Mary Ellen recounted the fascinating, often mysterious, history of local dance halls and the musicians who performed in them: Louis Cernocki welcomed the gangsters to his Crystal Ballroom in Fox River Grove and in the ’30s several “wise guys” kidnapped a security guard at the Fox Pavilion in McHenry and drove him to Chicago. In the meantime, their cohorts burned the place down. It did reopen later.

Archival storage sites maintained by the C & NW Historical Society

McHenry County was WWII home of German POWs, Japanese-Americans. At a time when some in this country feel a sense of antipathy toward Arab-Americans living among us, it is worth remembering that during World War II a number of Japanese-Americans – as well as German prisoners of war – were working and living in McHenry County.