Why are rocks often so fascinating? After all, they are just silent, inanimate objects—mysterious pieces of nature. They don’t sing songs, produce anything, or make politically incorrect statements. They simply aren’t interesting. Well, maybe some of them are.
We make pets out of them, put them into fountains and gardens, and ooh and aah over them when we see really big ones in the Grand Canyon or Zion National Park in Utah.
Some rocks, moreover, simply capture the imagination and curiosity of people like this writer, who is always looking for a good story. Maybe it’s their location, shape, or size. Or maybe it’s just because they’re there.
Such a rock sits, lonely but stately, next to a large oak tree in a small meadow along Route 47, about a block south of Kreutzer Road. It has aroused the curiosity of several Sun City residents in recent years, who, in turn, aroused my interest.
How did this huge boulder (a semi-technical term for it) get there? Is there a story behind it? I started asking questions a few weeks ago, and many Huntley historians initially said they had no idea or any information. Frances Kruetzer, whose ancestors settled in Huntley more than 125 years ago and who has lived in the village for 61 years, said, “It’s been there ever since I can remember.”
When I started talking with the two Drendel families that owned farms west of Route 47, however, I hit historical pay dirt. After an initial Sun Day story mentioning Shirley and Vernon Drendel and their children a few weeks ago, the editors received an email from Richard and Diane Drendel Wagner. It informed us that there was a second Drendel family, Floyd and Marge and their three daughters, that owned a farm on land now occupied by the Walgreens and 7-Eleven shopping centers between Princeton Drive and Route 47. This is the site of a proposed new commercial development that is tentatively planned to be constructed in the aforementioned meadow.
Immediately south of the Drendel property was a farm owned by the Irv Manke family.
“My family was baling hay next to the present Walgreens store site up until the late 1990s,” Diane Drendel Wagner said. “My father, Floyd, farmed the area west of Route 47 from 1924 until he died in January of 2000, shortly after Del Webb starting building Sun City. His second farm was south along Route 47 and was sold to Del Webb in the late 1990s.”
Enter the rock.
According to Diane, Joseph Borelli, who developed the Walgreens and 7-Eleven areas in the late ’90s, decided that the rock, then located on the Manke Farm in the area where Citizens Bank and the Provena medical building now sit, needed to be moved. Employing a large bulldozer, he pushed it northeastward to its present location next to the oak tree “sometime around 1999 or 2000,” she said.
Today, the developer of the proposed new shopping center has submitted plans to the Village of Huntley that reportedly indicate the new set of stores will be located around the rock. The oak tree’s future is less certain, however.
Sorry, history buffs and curiosity seekers, no one knows anything more about the rock’s history. Guesses range from, “The rock was put on the Manke property by geological history millions of years ago,” to “Native Americans or early settlers may have tried to, or actually did, move it with ropes and teams of horses.”
Diane and her husband Richard Wagner now live in Sun City. Diane is the oldest of the three daughters born to Floyd and Margaret. Judy and Janet are the others. Floyd and Margaret Landwehr were married in 1946 and celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1996. Floyd and Vernon were brothers. Floyd and Margaret milked cows, sold seeds, did carpentry work for neighbors, and helped build three farm homes in the area. Marge and Floyd also did custom butchering of geese, ducks, and chickens for customers in the area. Floyd became ill in 1998 and he and Margaret moved to Gilberts. The Drendel property and equipment were auctioned off on December 4, 1999.
(Some of the above information was abstracted from the book “At Home in Huntley, 1851-2001,” published on the occasion of the village’s sesquicentennial celebration.)
2 Comments
thanks for the nice article Dwight! Family will love it.
I think the developer should work both the rock and the tree into the site. There are three trees on the site, two could be removed, but the one next to the rock should stay. Why do developers constantly have to strip the land of everything. Use some imagination and build encompassing what is there.