McHenry County’s long history of serving the nation – and the Revolutionary War veteran buried here

Major Watson, whose first name might have been James, was born in New York around 1748. He is said to have fought in the Revolutionary War with George Washington and fought again in the War of 1812, where he was captured by the British and held prisoner until 1815.

That’s all according to a history about Watson written in Crystal Lake in 1965. Though some details are sketchy, what is known is that Watson, late in his life, went to live with his daughter and her husband, early white settlers of southern Wisconsin, and was buried in Linn Hebron Cemetery northwest of Hebron in 1848 after he died at age 100 (though some markers erroneously say he was born in 1739 and died in 1840).

He’s one of the few – if not the only – Revolutionary War veteran to be buried in McHenry County.

And though Watson moved to the area long after his military service, McHenry County has a long history of residents serving their country, answering the call and, in many cases, giving the ultimate sacrifice in times of war, up through the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

Hundreds of Civil War veterans are buried in McHenry County, among the scores who served. Others who gave their lives in the conflict have their final resting places on the battlefields of the South.

Seven men from McHenry County, for example, were among the nearly 25,000 who lost their lives at the Battle of Stones River in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in late 1862. They were buried in a common grave there, which was documented in a letter written to the Woodstock Sentinel in 1863, though two of them, Alvin Bunker and Orlando Nash, were later brought back to the county and reinterred in Woodstock and Crystal Lake, respectively, according to a recent history written for the McHenry County Historical Society and Museum in Union.

One of many local men who survived and lived to tell his dramatic war tales was Frank Hanaford, who moved to Huntley with his family in the 1850s and enlisted in 1861, answering the first call from President Lincoln. Hanaford was captured and held prisoner at the notorious prisoner camp at Andersonville, Georgia, but eventually escaped with several McHenry County men, according to a history by Don Purn for the historical society. Hanaford became a prominent citizen and died in 1925.

One local National Guard company that served in the Civil War was later called upon to fight in the Spanish-American War that started in 1898. Eleven years later, many Civil War veterans and families would gather on Woodstock Square to dedicate the war memorial that still stands today. Another decade or so after that, the Square would be the site of a Peace Parade held on Nov. 11, 1918, the day that the armistice was signed ending World War I.

Find out more about the county’s history in war and life at the McHenry County Historical Society and Museum in Union. Check out the museum website at mchenrycountyhistory.org or call 815-923-2267 for more details.

Kaitlyn Tomaszewski is a junior at Jacobs High School who is interning with the Northwest Herald.