Sitting in her apartment at Hearthstone Communities in Woodstock, 96-year-old Maria Bellairs recently reminisced about the good, as well as the heartbreaking, moments of her life. An active volunteer in the community, Bellairs is well-known for the many causes she supported, which included holding ice cream socials to raise money to save the Opera House, […]

When it comes to residents of Woodstock, Don Perkins is a self-proclaimed old-timer.  He’s lived in Woodstock all his life, in the same farmhouse he was born in almost 90 years ago, on a road named for his family. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, lived through the Great Depression, and he survived a […]

Perhaps no one was a more familiar presence in this city than Don Peasley, a writer and photographer whose work documenting events in Woodstock and McHenry County in eight separate decades made him a de facto local historian in addition to a journalist, publicist and columnist. He died May 3 at age 90, never having […]