As COVID-19 tore across the planet in the spring of 2020, a significant development for the city of McHenry-owned Colby-Petersen Farm property just north of McCullom Lake went mostly uncelebrated, McHenry Landmark Commission member Jeff Varda said.

The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in March last year after a successful application for the recognition was submitted by Loyola University doctorate students with support from Amy Hathaway, a survey and national register specialist at the Illinois Historic Preservation Office.

On Wednesday, Varda tried to finally commemorate the important historic designation for the property for the first time since the pandemic limited gatherings and celebrations.

But it wasn’t a traditional party and ribbon-cutting ceremony that he organized.

Instead, he thought it would be a good idea to have some students in art classes at McHenry High School come out and perform some sketches and capture some photographs of the former homestead settled in the 1840s by Page Colby, who used $130 to buy 80 acres along what would become McCullom Lake Road, city of McHenry records show.

The property passed down through five generations of what became the Colby-Petersen family, members of which lived there for 159 years until its last who farmed the land, Bob Petersen, died in 2002.

Some of the property was donated to the city by the family, and the city later bought more of the land, so it could be dedicated to educating the area about the development of agricultural technology and techniques; horses were used to pull equipment on the farm through the 1940s and maybe later, Varda said, making it one of the last in McHenry County to employ equines well after tractors running on fossil fuels had become commonplace.

His goal is for the high school students’ preparatory work to be fine-tuned into artistic pieces for display in a potential exhibit, perhaps at McHenry City Hall, that would honor the addition of Colby-Petersen Farm to the National Register, which includes at least 11 other properties in McHenry County and more than 90,000 across the country, according to a map on the website of the National Park Service, the agency maintaining the register.

Varda hopes one of the student works can be incorporated into a design that would adorn any signage mentioning Colby-Petersen Farm together with the National Register of Historic Places, to serve as an official logo for the property.

“This is real education. This is connecting the kids to their community. It’s them trying to understand the past. You’re combining what art should really do, which is make your society and your culture think about things,” Varda said.

Some of the students were allowed to cross yellow caution tape, one at a time, to take photos of cracks showing the interior of a horse barn that had been roped off after getting damaged by high winds during last month’s storm that brought a tornado through McHenry, stripping roofing and siding from some townhomes almost adjacent to the historic property. (Varda said the city already had budgeted money to help restore and secure that barn before the storm.)

Karina Lucarz, a junior independent studio student, said touring the property and learning about its significance in illustrating her hometown’s past was an important experience as an artist.

“I forgot this place existed. So when we first came here today, I just saw like a barn and some old structures, and I didn’t really think anything of it,” Lucarz said.

But she gained an appreciation for the creative sparks that could be generated by taking in the landscapes, the activity of animals on the property and its architecture.

She started off the class assignment by depicting the property’s bright red wooden dairy barn, which remains almost fully intact with a strong stone masonry foundation and a towering wooden silo. Varda said that structure contributed to the National Register’s consideration of the property as historic, as wood silos are rare on farm properties anymore since most have been replaced ones built from other materials.

“It still reminds us how this place was built,” Lucarz said.

Another trait of the Colby-Petersen Farm property that was crucial to its acceptance by the National Register is the Greek Revival style of architecture of the original cottage home. The style was popular nationwide from the 1820s to the 1860s, according to the application submitted by the Loyola University Department of History doctorate students, Sean Jacobson and Emily Paige Taylor.

It was built out of what is known as “yellow Fox River brick,” Varda said, making it the only Greek Revival farmhouse of the material. Its use was important to the National Register’s decision to acknowledge the property.

The property has been designated as a city of McHenry historic landmark since 1998.

“Because it’s their community, it’s also a sense of identity for them,” Bethany Gola, a student teacher in art education at McHenry High School, said of the student experiences Wednesday. “How do I fit into McHenry? So they gain that sense of identity individually, but then in the broader sense of community and then in an even larger sense of history.”