McHenry Crazy Quilt Block 7 - The Mill Pond

With my husband's cancer treatment going on, I haven't been able to focus on stitching too much lately.  I've been very tired but I did finish up on Block #7 of my McHenry Crazy Quilt.

If you're new to my blog, this quilt is a traditional style crazy quilt featuring old photos of special sites in my little town of McHenry Illinois.  When I complete this quilt, I will be donating it to the McHenry Public Library.

Block #7 is devoted to the Mill Pond:

And here is the photo that I used:

The building in the background is Landmark School which will be my next block.  The school is still there and still used as a grade school today.

This is a screenshot from Google Earth of the same spot today.  Actually, it's as close as I can get to the same area where the old photo was taken:

Since you can't see the school in the above photo, here is a screenshot that's slightly to the east:

And here's a photo of Boone Creek:

Again, this is slightly east of the top photo.

The above photo is a map of McHenry from 1872 showing the mill pond and the Owen Bros. Mill:
Okay, so unless you live in McHenry, you might not be interested in the visual information.  For me it's fun to know where things were back in the day!

If you live near a mill pond, they're not a body of water created by God.  They're man made for the purpose of running a grist mill with water power.  They're usually created by causing a creek to dam which floods the area causing water pressure to run the big wheel on the mill.

In the case of McHenry, the Boone Creek was dammed to create the mill pond.  Boone Creek was named after the Boone brothers, a couple of McHenry's early settlers.  Boone Creek runs off the Fox River and is pretty much all over McHenry!  We really can't go anywhere around here without crossing over it. 

In the winter months, the mill ponds would freez and ice houses on the pond would cut ice from them for refrigeration.

Once electricity took over, water power was no longer relied on for power.  In some cases, the old mill ponds were drained and that was the case here in McHenry.  Our mill pond was created in 1851 and was drained in 1929.

Okay, I hope I didn't bore you with all this.  I just love the history of McHenry!

I'll get on with some closeup photos of my stitching:

As I mentioned above, Block #8 will be of Landmark School.  I'll get started on that as soon as I can.  For now, I'm too focused on my husband's cancer treatment which is going well but it's tiring for both of us.