FCHS News
New Flagg Creek Heritage Center Proposed
To preserve and share the history of the Flagg Creek area, the Flagg Creek Heritage Society plans to construct a new facility on the grounds of Pleasant Dales Park District’s Walker Park in Burr Ridge, Illinois. The Flagg Creek Heritage Center will be a two-story, 5,500 square foot building offering space for collection storage, programs and events, and permanent, children’s, and traveling exhibits. The building will include multi-purpose space such as a classroom, lecture hall, activities room, and demonstration area that will be available to local groups.
Here will be the purpose-built location to which students from all the school districts in the local communities can come. Seeing the story of their own towns come to life, looking at tools used in the distant past in their very neighborhood, or clothes worn by earlier residents in their towns, with things they can touch and feel, to understand... History they can hold.
The Heritage Center will tell the stories of the National Heritage Corridor, including that of Native Americans, trappers, early settlers, and farmers who eventually acquired tracts of land and built local communities. The approximately 5,000 papers and artifacts in the Flagg Creek Heritage Society’s collection include the documented history of the Lyons Township school districts, letters to and from a local Civil War soldier, a collection of arrowheads that illustrates the presence of the Potawatomi in the area less than 200 years ago, and diaries from the 1830s to the 1850s by one of the first families to settle the area. But more than that, it will be the place people come today to tell their own stories.
To this end the Flagg Creek Heritage Society is undertaking an ambitious fund raising effort. One of the first steps in this process was to present the proposal, including architectural drawings and the preliminary plan at Lyons Township public hearings regarding the $10 million bond issue related to the Timber Trails referendum. The total estimated cost of the Heritage Center is $2,290,000 of which $1,145,000 was requested at the Lyons Township bond issue hearings. Copies of the proposal are available for a minimal charge.