Bulldozers roared to life Monday, chewing up yet another vintage McHenry County building to make way for commercial development and leaving area historians lamenting the loss.
Citing reports of teenagers hanging out in the building, officials of Immanuel LutheranChurch in Crystal Lake gave the order Monday morning to raze the turn-of-the-century barn.
By afternoon, the barn had been leveled.
The structure, once owned by the family of the late Florence Bohl, was a prominent landmark along U.S. Highway 14 at the eastern entrance to the city.
Church spokesman Bob Seegers said, “We don’t want anyone hurt, and we don’t want to worry about liability. This was the time to do it.”
The 40 acres on which the barn sat is under contract to be sold to Ryan Cos. of Minnesota, which church officials said has secured an anchor tenant for a 380,000-square-foot shopping center to open in 1998.
At the demolition site Monday, no one thought to save the antique signs, license plates and artifacts nailed to the interior walls to cover holes.
Church officials salvaged some beams to be used later in a memorial to Florence Bohl, said Seegers.
Local historian Jim Heisler lamented the loss of the building, saying, “Florence was one of a kind. She walked me through that barn and showed me steel guy wires that had been put in more than once to keep it upright.
“There was some beautiful wood in there–old, weathered,” Heisler said. “That old barn was built without nails, pegged together.”
Heisler said family, neighbors and friends would typically gather for such a barn-raising party in the 1920s. He described the sound of hammers and saws, men yelling and laughing as women put together meals for the crew.
Richard Brooks, spokesman for the Ryan Cos., would not disclose the nature of business or the name of the anchor tenant of the new mall, but one church official said the mall would include an upscale version of a grocery store already operating in Crystal Lake.
Ryan has developed Dominick’s supermarkets in Schaumburg and in Highland Park.
Brooks said the firm will meet with the city informally in mid-April and make a formal presentation about its project in May.
Crystal Lake City Manager Joseph Misurelli confirmed that the city has had preliminary conversations with Ryan about the site, but said no drawings have been filed.
Seegers said he saw tentative drawings on a recent trip to visit Ryan headquarters in Minnesota.
He called the planned center “upscale,” saying, “We wanted to find a company that would do a real good job for the people of Crystal Lake. This company uses more landscaping than any other company in the area, and their centers are nice looking.”
Although historical details on the barn are sketchy, Nancy Fike, executive director of the County Historical Society, which coincidentally has declared 1997 the “Year of the Barn in McHenry County”, said, “The gambrel roof makes it a classic dairy barn. Farmers used that roof to make more loft space.”
The property also had an excellent silo, a structure invented in McHenry County, according to Heisler.
Florence Bohl died in poverty at the age of 71 in 1993, bequeathing her last possession, her farm, to her church. She may never have realized the land, in a prime commercial area of Crystal Lake, was worth many millions of dollars.
