The Hancock County Historical Society is hosting a program for its quarterly July meeting on July 19th starting at 7:00 PM. The program will be held at the Carthage Community Center on 301st East Main Street in Carthage Illinois

This program, by well-known Illinois historian John Hallwas, will provide insights about, and appreciation for, life in early Hancock County--and it will focus on some local poets who reflected the issues and struggles of nineteenth-century residents. Three authors who produced some poems that are still interesting for us today will be emphasized: Thomas Gregg, the early newspaperman and historian who resided in Carthage, Warsaw, Plymouth, and Hamilton; Eliza Snow, a noted Mormon woman who lived at Nauvoo during the turbulent years of local conflict and then participated in the exodus to Utah; and John Hay, the famous Secretary of State and Lincoln biographer who had been raised in Warsaw, and whose ballads about rural folks became nationally famous.

Hallwas has written thirty books, several plays, and hundreds of articles about Illinois history and literature--including a biography of Thomas Gregg and articles about Eliza Snow and John Hay. Retired from Western Illinois University, he lives in Macomb and has interacted with a variety of western Illinois historians over the past fifty years, including several from Hancock County.

This program is a grant sponsored by the Two Rivers Arts Council