The Evansville Grove Society will sponsor a Historic House Tour on Saturday, September 19th , from 1 PM to 5 PM in Evansville’s historic district. Five landmark homes will be included on the tour, all of them within walking distance of each other.
Admission for the event will be $20 in advance or $25 on the day of the event, when the Grove Society will have a tent on First Street between Evans Hall (104 W. Main St.) and the Tower House (44 W. Main St.). Children 12 and under will be admitted free.
Tickets may be purchased online. Tickets will also be on sale at the Society’s museum in the Historic Baker Building, 15 Antes Drive in Leonard-Leota Park, Saturdays between 1 and 4PM, or through the Evansville Chamber of Commerce during regular business hours. All proceeds will go to support the Grove Society’s efforts at preserving Evansville’s history.
The Grove Society’s annual History in the Park event will take place Sunday, August 16, at the Pruden Pavilion (upper pavilion) in Leonard-Leota Park.
This year’s program, entitled “History in the Street: Evansville’s Banner Project,” will highlight five of the noteworthy Evansville natives among the twenty or so whose faces appear on the banners recently hung from the streetlights along Main Street. Evansville Mayor Abbey Barnes, who spearheaded the project, will introduce the program. The five individuals featured are Ida Conroy, Dr. John Evans, Ethel Gibbs, Burr Jones, and Peter Templeton. Family members of several of the luminaries will be on hand to present their stories.
As usual, a lunch of brats, hotdogs, and side items will be provided free. Lunch will be served beginning at noon, with the hour-long program to start promptly at 1 pm.
At noon on July 4, a group of fifteen volunteers organized by the Grove Society gathered at the Tom Kerkenbush memorial in Leonard-Leota Park to read the Declaration of Independence. A nice crowd gathered to hear the reading, including some people who had come all the way from Illinois to attend.
The 15 volunteers who read the Declaration of Independence.
A video recording of the reading may be found here. Each volunteer took turns at one of three microphones to read a section of the Declaration, concluding with a recitation of the names of the 57 members of the Second Continental Congress who signed the document.
The Declaration came into being through a democratic process. Although Congress appointed a committee of three to draft the document — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin — the drafters borrowed freely from other Patriot writings and lots of people made their own edits along the way. The Declaration was a consensus document, carefully worked out word by word over a long time.
Continental Congress formally approved the edited version on July 4, 1776, and all 57 delegates put their names to it. That was the moment at which the United States of America came into being: as President Lincoln later put it, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” John Adams called it “the greatest Question which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was or ever will be decided among men.”
Independence Day thus commemorates one of the greatest events in human history. The Declaration is a living document. It remains to this day a rebuke to tyrants and a beacon of resistance the world over. It articulates “the last, best hope of earth,” as Lincoln put it in 1862.
On Thursday, June 25, Professor John W. Hall of the UW-Madison History Department presented a talk, entitled “Washington’s Partisans: Early American Warfare Reconsidered,” at the Eager Free Public Library in Evansville. The Grove Society sponsored the talk jointly with the Library and UW Badger Talks as part of its observance of the 250 th anniversary of the American Revolution.
Professor Hall began his talk by challenging what he called the “received wisdom” that General (later President) George Washington led the American colonists to victory over the British by using informal, “frontier” tactics against which the professional soldiers in the British Army were unable to defend themselves. This “frontier” myth has been a durable part of US military culture as well as in American culture at large. Academic historians, Professor Hall told the audience, believe that the standard view has only a little basis in fact.
Instead, Professor Hall said, Washington was no less devoted to professional European military doctrine than his British opponents. The British, meanwhile, were far from helpless and able to adapt strategy and tactics to North American conditions. Washington was successful because he supplemented his use of professionally-trained troops with European-style “partisans” (small, highly mobile forces comparable to today’s Army Rangers or Special Forces) and “irregulars” (militia soldiers who maintained their civilian lives and took up arms only when the fighting came to their neighborhoods).
These “irregular” forces were especially important because they were the mainstay of the colonists’ defense against the larger and more powerful British. Washington reserved his professional troops for situations in which he could achieve the kind of spectacular victories that would eventually cause the British to tire of the fight. Washington’s genius lay in his ability to use all three kinds of forces effectively under North American conditions.
Join us down at Leonard-Leota Park for a reading of the Declaration of Independence, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of The United States of America.
July 4th at 12 pm.
Location is south of the Park Store on the cement pad that is the former site of “The Shack”. There is a plaque there in Tom Kerkenbursh’s honor. Generally, we’ll be set up across the street from the Boy Scout fire pit.
NOTE: If rain is in the forecast, the location could change.
The Evansville Grove Society is joining forces with the Eager Free Public Library to celebrate the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States by holding a contest to design a coin commemorating the anniversary. Contestants will design a coin that depicts “what the 250th anniversary looks like” to them personally. The winning design will be placed on an antique brass coin, minted and available for distribution around the Fourth of July. We encourage people of all ages to participate and hope to have a large selection of pictures from which to choose the winner. Entry forms are available at the library; the deadline to submit is May 1st.
Have fun! Be creative! Show us what the 250th looks like to you!
On Sunday afternoon, February 22, the Grove Society sponsored a watch party for a new PBS Wisconsin documentary, Bucky!, on the life and times of the beloved UW mascot. PBS reached out to us because an Evansville Resident from the early twentieth century, Lloyd “Babe” Spencer, played an important role in the story. “Babe” was the original mascot for the UW teams and was known for his playful nature and for bringing his pet badger, “Billie,” to the games with him. In the late 1940s Wisconsin Athletics replaced the live “Billie” with the cartoon character, “Bucky” that we know today.
The party took place at The Night Owl in Evansville; the Night Owl’s Travis Ardisson was happy to collaborate with the Grove Society and provided a special menu of old-time Wisconsin food and drink. A delegation from PBS Wisconsin included the documentary’s director and producer, who entertained questions from the audience after the showing.
The highlight of the party, however, was an appearance by Bucky Badger himself, who spent an hour posing for pictures, delighting the many children in attendance, and leading them around the place as if he were the Pied Piper.
Bucky also assisted in awarding Evansville’s First Historian, Ruth Ann Montgomery, with a lifetime membership in the Grove Society.
A running theme of the documentary is the way in which Bucky Badger appeals to everyone who cares about Wisconsin: he makes people happy, makes us feel connected in our love for him and for our state. As the photographs make clear, Bucky did that for everyone who attended the watch party: we laughed, we delighted in his shenanigans, we felt fortunate to be able to share in his Bucky-ness for an afternoon. The Night Owl, PBS Wisconsin, Wisconsin Athletics, and the Grove Society all contributed to the event’s success, but at the end of the day the event’s contribution to the life of Evansville’s community amounted to considerably more than the sum of the parts.
The documentary can be found on the PBS Wisconsin app, as well as on PBS’s YouTube channel. There is additional content on the PBS Wisconsin page and on Youtube, including an original short feature on RoseAnn Donovan, a woman who was Bucky in the 1980s.
Put on your Badger Red and join us at the Night Owl on February 22nd to watch the new PBS documentary on the life and times of UW’s beloved mascot, Bucky Badger.
PBS Wisconsin will premiere “The Life and Art of Theodore Robinson: From Evansville to Giverny and Back Again” on its University Place program on January 29, 2026 at 9pm. The presentation, sponsored by the Evansville Grove Society, was recorded at Creekside Place on October 11, 2025. Robinson, a highly regarded Impressionist painter, grew up in Evansville. The program, by Dr. Janine Yorimoto Boldt of the UW Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, discusses his roots in Evansville and their impact on his life’s work.
