McHenry in the Prohibition era: New Landmark Commission video peers at city’s boozy past

After months of diving into McHenry’s Prohibition-era history, Joel Bennett sees parallels between then and now.

When residents complain on social media about the number of drinking establishments downtown, that isn’t dissimilar to people’s gripes in the 1920s “with drinking in general. It is, ‘Oh my God, there are too many drinkers in McHenry,’” Bennett said.

Over the past two years, he and his brother, Jerry Bennett, have both become students of the history of McHenry since their video production company, Fine Line Productions, was hired by the city’s Landmark Commission. The two entities have now produced two documentaries looking at the city’s past.

The documentary “History of McHenry IL: Prohibition Era” was released Tuesday on the Landmark Commission’s Facebook page, facebook.com/McHenryLandmark. Their first collaboration, “Agricultural History of McHenry,” was released in April. Both videos are also available at Fine Line Productions’ YouTube channel, youtube.com/@finelineproductions2858.

Both films came about because of the Colby-Petersen Farm, Landmark Commission Chairman Thomas Hillier said. When the farm was left to the city of McHenry by Bob Petersen, “it was set up to be used for education on the history of agriculture in McHenry County and the country at large,” Hillier said. The video series, first suggested by former commission Chairman Jeff Varda, is part of that education component.

Varda – or Mr. Varda to Joel Bennett, who had him as a teacher in school – reached out to the Bennett brothers about producing the videos.

“The Landmark Commission was going around to the schools and teaching them about agriculture and Petersen Park,” Joel Bennett said. “They were finding that it was hard to reach all of the students.”

The agriculture documentary is designed for teachers to use in high school classrooms “to know where McHenry came from and for some civic pride on top,” Joel Bennett said.

“There is a lot of information there,” his brother said. “We broke it into four-episode chunks so they can [watch] it in smaller forms and don’t have to sit through an hourlong video.”

The Prohibition video is an easily digestible 18 minutes long, and looks at how McHenry and McHenry County officials reacted to those years in U.S. history when alcohol was banned.

Jerry Bennett said he was surprised to learn about the bootlegging history of McHenry “and how it relates to the McHenry Brewery and the speakeasy that was supposedly across the street and the tunnel underneath Pearl Street.”

Found during the removal of the old one-lane Pearl Street bridge, that passageway was just deep and wide enough to roll barrels between the two buildings, according to the documentary.

One of the interview subjects in the documentary is one of the owners of Ye Olde Corner Tap, Jessica Schneider. It’s one of the oldest buildings in downtown, and Schneider said bullets were in the walls during a renovation. The bar has also embraced its bootlegging past by featuring drinks that would have been ordered during prohibition.

Historian Craig Pfannkuche, interviewed inside the Foxhole Pizza and Pub, points out that the restaurant’s bar is the same one that’s been in the building since before Prohibition.

More documentaries are planned, the Bennetts said. They went into the Prohibition video wanting to feature women’s suffrage as well as gambling, but decided to give those future videos of their own.

There are “great parallels” between gambling now and then, Jerry Bennett said. Gambling “didn’t start as illegal. They would ‘play the numbers’ with a lottery.” Now, he said, many downtown businesses offer gambling.