It’s been at least 20 years since Richmond held its last, official Round-Up Days.

From 1980 to 2005, the late August community festival was about “rounding up your friends and family” and bringing them home to Richmond before school started in the fall, Assistant Village Manager Kristen Murphy said.

Back then, they would have music, games, pony rides and parades. Murphy admitted some of her knowledge about the festival’s earlier days comes from “second-hand sources. I think what is was in the Eighties versus the early 2000s was vastly different,” she said. “It was a bigger deal back then.”

On June 27 and 28 – and with the help of community organizations celebrating their own milestone anniversaries – the beloved festival is returning to Richmond.

The village’s community development committee has been working to bring village-wide events back to the tiny town that sits on the border with Wisconsin. That’s why Richmond started putting on a fall festival and its St. Patrick’s Day event at The District at Memorial Hall, Murphy said.

The committee was considering its plans for the country’s 250th birthday when Katie Anderson-Tedder of Anderson’s Candy Shop reached out. The family chocolatier store is in its 100th year in downtown Richmond. It’s also the 100th anniversary for the Richmond Township Fire Protection District.

“We are here to celebrate all of these great things,” Murphy said.

McHenry County residents may remember Anderson’s Candy already celebrating a centennial, in 2019. That was in honor of the birthday of the original store in Chicago. Her great-grandparents, Arthur and Gertrude Anderson, moved the chocolate shop to the up-and-coming village of Richmond in 1926, Anderson-Tedder said.

With all of these big milestones coming together at the same time, this year’s Round-Up “is an ode to all of the things that people remember about it,” Murphy said.

The festival is sort of a split, Anderson-Tedder said.

“It is in equal portion a love letter to the residents ... being neighbors, seeing neighbors and having fun together,” she said, and another portion of showing off their community.

“We are bigger than the 1,200 people who live here. We are a community that is made up of a lot of visitors, and this is a special place for a lot of those visitors,” Anderson-Tedder said.

Events kick off at 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Saturday, June 27, with a pancake breakfast put on by the fire protection district at 5513 George Street, next to the old fire house. Beers and burgers will go on sale there at noon.

That is also where bands will be playing from noon to 11 p.m.

George Street is the only downtown roadway that will be closed off during the festival, Murphy said.

A highlight for her will also be the unveiling of the items taken – and salvaged – from Richmond’s time capsule, buried after the country’s 1976 bicentennial celebrations.

When the village sold Memorial Hall to a private owner in 2021, leaders decided to pull the flag-painted, cement sarcophagus out before the sale closed.

In the 45 years since it was buried, the crypt flooded. About 70% of the buried items were sort-of salvageable, Murphy said. “It is not perfect. The paper is a little wrinkly.”

The time capsule contents – including letters written by the town’s children 50 years ago – will be on display at the Stevens Park Gazebo.

Richmond is again planning to collect items for the next time capsule, to be sealed until the nation’s 300th birthday in 2076.

This time, plans are to keep the time capsule high and dry in a case at village hall, Murphy said.

A full calendar of events can be found at the Richmond Round-Up Days 2026 – America 250 Facebook page.

Also at Round-Up Days, the family of a local boy with leukemia, Levi Johnson, will be on hand with Levi’s Lemonade Stand to raise funds to fight childhood cancer.