BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Five Illinois Wesleyan University alumni are recreating music history. C. Roland Hill ’51, Marie Ann Hill ’52, Sara Simpson ’70, Bob Jackson ’76 and Mark Lareau ’93 are all members of the 33rd Illinois Volunteer Regiment Band, an authentic recreation of a Civil War Era band from McLean County.
The 33rd Illinois Volunteer Regiment Band is a not-for-profit group that performs for historic programs, civic and school events and military balls. In 2005, they performed at the 55th Presidential Inaugural Parade in Washington, D.C. The band has performed at Illinois Wesleyan twice: for University’s sesquicentennial in 2000 and again in 2007. This past summer the group made another trip to Washington, D.C. to tour the nation’s capital, also playing at the Gettysburg National Battlefield Visitors Center in Gettysburg, Pa. and in the Dunker Church at Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Md. They band was accompanied by several members of the Central Illinois Civil War Dance Society, a group that regularly joins them to perform period dances to the “hits of the 1860s.”