The McHenry Music Festival 2025 brought just shy of 10,000 concert attendees to the city each night last weekend, McHenry Mayor Wayne Jett said.
“This weekend is finally over,” Jett told the McHenry City Council on Monday night. The last show for the three-day concert series at Petersen Park was Sunday evening.
He went on to thank the 900 volunteers that showed up to help – including McHenry City Council members Bobbi Baehne, Steve Doherty, Andy David and Sue Miller.
Jett and his wife, Amber, founded the RISE Up Foundation to produce the concert series, with proceeds – between $200,000 and $300,000 – going to help fund community projects in McHenry.
An accounting firm is working on the numbers to determine what the donation will be this year, Jett said. Funds raised by the concert are set to go toward a pump bike track at Knox Park that has a $600,000 estimated price tag.
The biggest issue for the concert series this year was not getting people into Petersen Park, but getting them out of the parking lots after, Jett said. He plans to hire a company in 2026 “to handle the parking situation [so] if you are missing two volunteers it is not going to cause an issue at 11 o’clock at night.”
Many of those visiting came from outside the McHenry area, according to Baehn and Miller.
At the booth she staffed, “one out of every 10 people were from the area” and the rest who spoke to her were from hours away, Baehne said.
Miller said she was checking IDs and “people came from Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee for the show.”
Typically a Thursday-through-Saturday series, the 2025 festival was shifted to Friday to Sunday this year to accommodate Sunday’s headliner, Bailey Zimmerman. It will shift back to the previous scheduled days, according to the mchenrymusicfest.com website.
Two of the 2026 headliners were also announced over the weekend – country music acts Hardy and Kane Brown.
“We have sold 50% of our pit tickets already” for the 2026 show, Jett said.
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