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Travel Back in Time to ‘The Gathering’ By Janine Pumilia
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rare opportunity to step back in time and experience pre-1850s life in our region is coming up April 27 & 28 during The Gathering event at Macktown Living History Center, 2221 Freeport Road in Rockton, Ill. You’ll meet re-enactors portraying traders and trappers, French voyageurs, Native Americans and early settlers, including Stephen Andrew Mack Jr. and his wife, Mary Hononegah, founders of a once-thriving community named Pecatonic, also called Mack’s Town or Macktown. You can try your hand at the skills settlers depended upon for survival and sample food and drink made in that era. “This is a time period when our region was the American West,” says Ami Sommerfield, a member of the Macktown Living History board of directors. Americans were migrating here from the
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Smart Living Weekly
East Coast and building communities, traveling mostly by animal, river raft or on foot. There were no railroads or steamboats here and the California Gold Rush had not yet begun. “Not only is this a fun event for kids and families, but it’s also a teaching event to help people understand how people at Macktown, and people of that era in general, lived,” says Sommerfield. On the early frontier, a Gathering was a special time for people to come together to trade, socialize, share news, have sporting contests and sometimes even marry. The Forest Preserves of Winnebago County, which owns the land on which the historic site exists, and the Macktown Living History board, are working to restore Macktown to its 1834 to 1850 historic appearance. The living history
April 24
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center is staffed entirely by volunteers who want to make sure our regional history is not lost. “In some ways, the Macktown Living History site is the best-kept secret in Winnebago County,” says Connie Gleasman, former board member and longtime volunteer. In its heyday, Pecatonic, which was located at the confluence of the Rock and Pecatonica rivers, included the Macks’ two-story home and store, a cabinet maker’s shop, an inn, a schoolroom, a shoemaker’s shop, a tavern, a trading post, fur trappers’ cabins and other homes belonging to the population of 200 to 300 people. A ferry and bridge traversed the Rock River near where the original stone trading post structure still stands. “The Mack home was one of the first homes in our region constructed of
