If your dander gets up when you see the battle flag of the Confederacy flying, you might want to avoid Hainesville this weekend. The village’s annual Civil War Encampment and Battle will be held on the private grounds of the Northbrook Sports Club off South Hainesville Road.
There has been little controversy over this two-day event featuring a mock battle, compared to what Lake County officials and Civil War reenactors faced back in the summer of 2019. That’s when many may remember Forest Preserves President Angelo Kyle of Waukegan unilaterally and abruptly decided to cancel the county’s annual Civil War Days at Lakewood Forest Preserve near Wauconda.
Until that time, the district had hosted Civil War Days for some 28 years. It featured recreations of clashing Union and Confederate role-playing forces, along with military bivouacs and civilian encampments, drawing thousands of participants and visitors to the Wauconda area.
Kyle was assailed for his view that the sight of the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flown by treasonous Confederate armies during the War Between the States, as Southerners like to call the conflict, would be inappropriate. Some questioned the event being held on taxpayer-funded property, considering the root cause of the war was slavery and the political fight over expanding slavery into Western states.
He and other county officials received major pushback and Kyle promised he would “never again” unilaterally cancel another event while helming the district. Forest Preserves’ officials then decided to return the event to Lakewood Preserve in 2020.
The COVID-19 epidemic dashed those plans, as did this year’s resurgence of the virus. It’s unclear if plans are being made for a revival of the county-sponsored Civil War Days in 2022.
So Lake County fans of Civil War reenactments are left with the Hainesville spectacle, as they were in 2019 following the county’s half-baked and hurried decision. Two years ago, the Hainesville encampment drew nearly 160 reenactors and more than 1,000 onlookers.
Reenactors from across Illinois and the Midwest volunteered their time to make the county event as realistic as can be without the use of CGI, the computer-generated imagery Hollywood filmmakers now rely. Certainly, dressed in period costumes they will do the same during the Hainesville encampment, educating folks about the history, lore and legacy of the war which claimed an estimated 450,000 Union and rebel troops.
More than a decade before the war broke out in April 1861, the village was surveyed and named in the 1840s by Elijah Haines, a native New Yorker.
At the start of the war, hundreds of Lake Countians, mainly Waukeganites, joined the federal cause to keep the union together when recruiters came calling.
One of them was Orion Howe, a Medal of Honor recipient during the Siege of Vicksburg in the spring and summer of 1863. It was one of the defining battles of the Civil War, giving prominence to Union Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman. Howe, a drummer boy, left his home in Waukegan when he was 12 to join the 55th Illinois Infantry, also known as the Canton Rifles.
This year, the Hainesville encampment will feature as its set battle piece the Battle of Bentonville which was fought in Johnston County, North Carolina, southeast of Raleigh, in late March 1865. It was the last battle in the southeastern theater of the war, pitting Sherman’s army against Confederate forces led by Gen. Joseph Johnston.
Spoiler alert: The Union Army defeated the rebels. Soon after, on April 9, 1865, the bloody war ended with the surrender of rebel forces commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
The Hainesville event will be on Hainesville Road, south of Route 120, and runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 16, and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 17. The faux battle will be held on the afternoons of both days.
More information is available on the village’s Website, www.hainesville.org. Admission is free, but parking is $10 for vehicles; $5 for motorcycles.
If you attend and partake in the ceremonies, reflect on what the nation would be like if people like Grant, Sherman and Howe had failed to defeat an insurrectionist army. That’s one reason to continue to hold such Civil War reenactments, on private or public lands.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.?sellenews@gmail.com. Twitter: @sellenews
