05/26/2026
The Sanfilippo Estate OH NUTS! AMAZING Tour (Barrington, IL) NEW
Date: Tuesday, October 6 Departs: 8:00 am Returns: 6:30 pm approx.
Cost: $118.00 per person (All gratuities are included)
We will begin our day at the Fischer Nut Factory Outlet, owned by the Sanfilippo family. You will receive 10% off your purchases. Next, we will head to Chessie’s Restaurant where we will be eating in an actual train car. The menu will be announced in the next newsletter. Following lunch, we will be going to the amazing estate of the Sanfilippo family. We will have a 3-hour docent-guided tour with places to sit along the way. The Sanfilippo family have collected many amazing items that are on display in their residence. It's just a stunning and amazing tour. Before there were jukeboxes and radios, there were nickelodeons and orchestrions, ingenious mechanical music machines that played the music of the day to entertain the public. Whether in restaurants, bars, hotels, skating rinks, dance halls, or fairgrounds, these commercial, automated machines attracted crowds with their elaborate, artistic facades and their ability to replicate sounds from a small group of musicians up to a full orchestra, all with mechanically controlled mechanisms. The Sanfilippo Collection has the largest variety of these restored instruments in the world. When you listen to a musical selection played on one of these automatic marvels, you are hearing exactly what the people heard and experienced when it was new, whether it was 1890, 1910, or 1930. Housing the collection, the Sanfilippo "Place de La Musique" recreates the Victorian era of the first movie palaces, with architectural details and coordinating, antique amenities, as well as serving the acoustical purpose of hearing some of the larger machines such as a fairground organ or a theater pipe organ, in an appropriate setting. The Music Theater can seat 350 and houses the largest theatre pipe organ ever built. At 80 ranks it is nearly a third larger than the organ at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The overall experience is an auditory and visual immersion in one or the most exciting eras. To further showcase aspects of this inventive era, see restored working steam engines, bi-polar generators, over-headline shafts, and machines that played a critical role in this evolution. There are eight operating steam engines in the lower level of the main house and over twenty in the Carousel Building, including the one that originally operated the 1890 French Salon Carousel. Additionally, there is an 1881 Grant Steam Locomotive with restored caboose and 1890's Pullman passenger car. There are six vintage street clocks around the estate and a newly restored tower clock in the carousel building with its own 33' ornate tower, as well as other examples of tower clock mechanisms. The jewel of The Sanfilippo Collection is the Eden Palais, built in 1890, the most complete example of a European Salon Carousel in existence. R
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