Here’s a word you’ll be hearing more and more next year: Semiquincentennial.

Spellcheck will question if it’s a real word. It is. It means a 250th anniversary.

Which is what the U.S. will be celebrating next year, marking our daring break from Great Britain and the founding of the nation. Wasn’t it just the other day we had the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, during the Swingin’ Seventies? Time does fly.

In New England, states began kicking off the historic semiquincentennial on Friday by commemorating the April 18, 1775, heroic ride of Paul Revere the year before independence was declared. In the Boston area, residents were urged to post two lights in their windows that night.

As most of us should know, silversmith Revere and other patriots alerted the Massachusetts countryside of British troops planning to crack down on nascent revolutionaries by crossing the Charles River by boat from Boston prior to battles at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, which ignited the American Revolutionary War.

The colonists’ planned signal alert was lanterns in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church: “One if by land, and two if by sea.” Revere’s “The British are coming” ride was immortalized in poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” published in 1861.

America250 is the umbrella organization tasked with observing July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some may say the semiquincentennial is coming at just the right time, as the ideals of democracy as we have known it since 1776 are being challenged daily.

That may be why the administration of President Donald Trump is working to undercut the celebration by slashing federal funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which may leave the agency with less money to hand out to local groups for programming related to the milestone.

Additionally, roughly 80% of the agency’s staff have been placed on administrative leave, according to The Associated Press.

While downstate Illinois took part with various actions during the early founding of the republic, Lake County did not at all. But, the state has its own Illinois America250 Commission, established by the legislature in 2022 to “develop, encourage, and execute an inclusive commemoration and observance of the founding of the United States of America, and Illinois’ imperative role in the nation’s history.”

The 18-person commission, with members from across the breadth and length of the Land of Lincoln, has been meeting regularly since its inception, bouncing around ideas of where Illinois fits in with the celebration. The group’s next virtual meeting is set for April 28.

The working deadline for a “commemorations toolkit” is this July 4, according to commission meeting minutes.

Museums, schools, libraries, regional tourism hubs and universities are being targeted, along with individual municipalities and governmental units, so Illinois has some place in the anniversary game. A similar tack, leaving local events and celebrations to individual communities, was taken during the bicentennial year and before that in 1968, when the state’s sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of statehood, was observed.

Illinois became a state in 1818, 42 years after the formation of the United States and after indigenous peoples had inhabited it for thousands of years. Historians tell us the state played a major part in the Revolutionary War.

That’s when Virginian George Rogers Clark and his band of rangers seized the British post of Kaskaskia by the Mississippi River on July 4, 1778, marching across Illinois from Fort Massac by the Ohio River. After the war, Illinois became part of the U.S. and the Northwest Territory, eventually achieving statehood.

One Illinois community apparently ahead of the 250th celebration is Peoria.

The city’s Riverfront Museum along the Illinois River is partnering with Ken Burns, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, giving him the title of museum guest curator for its major semiquincentennial exhibition, funded by private donors, and expected to open in early 2026. Burns is slated to release a new series on the Revolutionary War next year.

I’m not sure how planning is going for Lake County to commemorate the semiquincentennial, although the Forest Preserve District’s Dunn Museum off Winchester Road in Libertyville has a permanent exhibit called “An American Frontier,” which highlights the county’s founding by European settlers in the early 1830s, along with other historical artifacts.

Many of the county’s communities were incorporated after the mid-19th century. Waukegan, first visited by Pere Marquette in 1673, was incorporated as Little Fort in 1859, after becoming the county seat in 1841.

It’s a long way from the Declaration of Independence signed by the Founding Fathers in 1776 to the early days of Lake County’s founding.

Yet, maybe those county communities that hold Fourth of July parades can incorporate the celebration into parade themes.

They shouldn’t overlook the chance to wave the flag and remember how and why the nation began.

Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.

sellenews@gmail.com X: @sellenews