The Land Conservancy
of McHenry County
"Preserving Land Forever"

OAK KEEPERS
Chapter 3

The story continues...

Some amazing revelations about the remaining oak woodlands in McHenry County came to light because of TLC’s 2-year-old Oak Keeper Program. We’ve gazed at a Witness Tree marked by a land surveyor in the 1830’s, we’ve discovered that there were swamp white oaks in the county before the time of European settlement, and we’ve had the privilege to sit in a grove of huge red oaks that were already large, mature trees when the Continental Congress sat down to business in Virginia more than 200 years ago, all because of the work done by several dozen trained Oak Keepers.

But only a mere fraction of the remaining oak woodlands found across McHenry County have been studied. As TLC gears up for a new round of training, we are also preparing to contact over 300 new landowners to seek their permission for Oak Keepers’ to survey their woods too. These land-owners have properties in eighteen oak woods that are each larger than 50 acres in size. Together, these eighteen woods include nearly 1,300 acres of oak woodlands! That’s a lot of ground to cover, and we need more Oak Keepers to help explore these additional lands. Given that the vast majority of the County’s surviving oaks are found on private property, there is no way of telling what surprises are waiting to be discovered!