How the History Center Celebrated the Bicentennial and Will Celebrate the Semiquincentennial

By Carol Summerfield

In case you’ve opted out of large words this year, it is the 250^th anniversary (the semiquincentennial) of the United States. Or, as it’s being branded by history museums across the U.S., America 250.

Many of the historical societies and small local history museums in America began around our Bicentennial in 1976. With the 200^th anniversary, we realized there was enough history that collecting and preserving it was worth undertaking. (Lake Forest was a bit ahead of the curve, founding the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society in 1972.)

Inventor A. B. Dick will be discussed as part of a 250th-anniversary lecture series.

The federal Bicentennial organizers promoted a Bicentennial Communities model, which encouraged local communities to plan their own celebrations. This initiative provided federal and state funding, along with matching grants, to local groups, making it easier for new historical organizations to form. The interest and funding opportunities ignited a boom in local preservation efforts and increased the professionalization of history museum staff. The Bicentennial marked what many see as the birth of the American public history movement, where people were encouraged to collect, record, and interpret their own community stories. The Historical Society sponsored weekly walking tours and ice cream socials in July 1976. In August of that year, the Historical Society published a book, How It All Began, by Joe Meads, a collection of 155 newspaper articles about the pioneers in Shields, Deerfield, Libertyville and Waukegan townships. Throughout the year, volunteers continued an oral history project focused on interviewing residents about their memories growing up in town. (Both the book and the cassette tape recordings are in the History Center’s archives.)

To wrap up the 200^th-anniversary festivities, in November 1976, the Historical Society hosted a dinner and community forum in honor of a reenactment by a 15-canoeist crew of the 1682 voyage of the French explorer La Salle down the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to New Orleans. According to a newspaper article on the event, “The twentieth-century La Salle crew set out last August in hand-crafted canoes. Their 3,000-mile journey took them from Montreal up the St. Lawrence River and down the Great Lakes. The stop in Lake Forest is the first in the Chicago area.” 

For the 250^th anniversary, The History Center has decided to reflect on the importance of local history in the collective narrative of our national history. On May 15, we will open a new exhibition entitled Painted Portraits: Illuminating Family History Through Imagery, which celebrates the lives that came before us and discusses their challenges and contributions to the American storybook. Interweaving the stories of Lake Foresters into the broader narrative is easy to do. So many of our residents played outsized roles in shaping the direction of the country. The exhibit will feature people such as inventor A.B. Dick, social leader Antoinette Corwith Dangler, and Senator Charles Benjamin Farwell.

Along with the exhibition, we are also hosting a year-long lecture series that shows how our local history intersected and influenced the nation's past. We'll show how that history ripples through the present and leads to our future. 

This special 10-part lecture series will bring local and regional scholars to the History Center and will be organized chronologically, giving attendees an overview of major American events across the past two centuries. To learn more, please click here.