Historical trolley tours to highlight Crystal Lake Central High School area

CRYSTAL LAKE – Trolley tours featuring some of Crystal Lake’s historic homes are selling out quickly.

Five of the nine 45-minute tours being offered from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday by the Crystal Lake Historical Society already have been filled, said Diana Kenney, the society’s president.

The Historical Society offers a different tour every year, and this year’s tour will center on the Crystal Lake Central High School area, exploring the people who lived there, the architecture of the home and the history of the house itself.

The route passes four kit or catalog homes, three of which were ordered from Sears and the fourth from Gordon-VanTine, Kenney said.

Several homes on the route were moved to their current locations, and many of the homes on Ester Street were built by Oscar Strom, who built the Tudor-style pump house at Franklin Avenue and College Street.

The demolition of the pump house by Crystal Lake Community School District 47 in the late 1990s to build a parking lot was a “big controversy in town,” but one of the homes on Ester Street resembles the structure, Kenney said.

The Crystal Lake Historical Society has been offering heritage tours for 18 years, starting with house walks and transitioning to trolley tours nearly a decade ago, Kenney said.

The trolley tours are easier to coordinate because they don’t require getting permission from homeowners to let people walk through their homes, and they allow the tours to accommodate more people.

The first tour leaves at 10 a.m. from the downtown gazebo in Depot Park. Tours leave every half hour rain or shine.

Tickets are $10 and include a book on the 25 to 30 properties featured on the tour. They can be bought at Heisler’s Bootery, 50 N. Williams St., Crystal Lake.

For information, call 815-479-0835.