Resident Spotlight: Rick Williams on a life immersed in local history

Our Resident Spotlight series highlights individuals in Mahomet who contribute to our community in different ways. Below, we learn what Mahomet means to Rick Williams, who has devoted his life to learning and sharing local histories.

A retired history teacher who has lived in Mahomet for 30 years, Rick Williams sees Mahomet’s ever-changing present through the lens of history.

“The thing I love about Mahomet is that there are still vestiges of how things were at the very beginning,” he said. “Originally, the way you came into Mahomet was across the iron bridge that you can still walk across.”

Williams explains that certain spots are configured in the same way they were in the nineteenth century, when Mahomet was first established along the Sangamon River: “Turn the corner at the Walgreens, before you reach Lombard St., and that’s where Mahomet started, right on that curve. That’s where the first houses were.”

He notes that parts of Main Street, Turkey Farm Road, and South Mahomet Road “still feel like what it must have felt like back then...on the exact same alignment,” which makes traveling around town feel like “driving back through time.”

“I really feel the reality of the past through things that are here now that were there then,” he said. “That’s always been my draw.”

Feeling that pull, Williams has spent his life learning about the places he has lived and sharing that knowledge with others. He was an aspiring journalist when an encouraging professor steered him toward becoming a history teacher. After working a newspaper job in historic Ste. Genevieve, MO and collaborating on a magazine centered around historic buildings in small towns across Central Illinois, Williams taught history for decades at Judah Christian School in Champaign, IL. Yet he retained a lifelong passion for translating history outside the classroom, whether offering instruction in history for prisoners or giving public talks at the Champaign County History Museum, on whose board he also served.

Williams has continued educating others through his Facebook page and blog, where he records personal research projects and “history adventures.” These “adventures” have centered on three large projects, some requiring years of research.

Williams first visited each of the 130 sites listed in the 1976 Champaign County Bicentennial booklet in order to record what kind of shape each site was in. He later explored three historical atlases of Champaign County (1893, 1913 and 1929) that mapped the locations of every school and church in each county community. After visiting over 100 rural churches, he created suggested driving tours and posted them to his blog for others to follow. Now, Williams is exploring the “auto trails” that predate numbered highways; in our area, these include the Egyptian Trail, Waubonsie Trail, and Diagonal Trail. A recent Facebook post describes how the Diagonal Trail followed what is now US 150, traveling northwest from Champaign to Mahomet and on to Mansfield. Readers of these posts will find meticulous detail, well-cited research, and personal photographs that show Williams’s exploration on foot, work that clearly reflects his passion for local history and love for “getting out into the community.”

At a time when Mahomet is rapidly growing and changing, it can help to remember that our history as a community is longer than we might realize. Through his research, Williams’s work shows you what Mahomet was like 75, 100, or even 150 years ago.

“You’d be amazed if you could see the Mahomet that we moved to 30 years ago...there wasn’t a single stoplight in town,” he said. “Although it’s a completely different town than it was even [when I moved here], there are still places in Mahomet that are exactly the way they were a hundred years ago.”

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