Homes for sale in
Bull Valley.

Bull Valley's modern identity began not with a frontier town founding but with a 1942 land-use group. That year, a group of neighbors organized the Countryside Improvement Association to deal with questions of land use across the rolling, wooded valleys west of McHenry. In 1955, in an unprecedented step, owners of about 3,000 acres, roughly half of the Bull Valley area at the time, voluntarily put their land into 3-acre zoning, the highest residential classification then offered by the county. Several of the area's mid-19th-century farmsteads still anchor the village today, including the 1836 George Stickney House (now Village Hall and the Bull Valley Police Department), built by spiritualists George and Sylvia Stickney with rounded interior corners because they believed evil spirits could collect in 90-degree corners.

In 1960 residents funded a planning study by private subscription, and in 1961 the Eastern McHenry County Plan Association recommended that a large part of the Bull Valley area be zoned for residential and estate use at a 5-acre minimum. Residents formally incorporated as a village on July 23, 1977, primarily to gain the legal authority to defend the rural, low-density character they had been protecting informally for 35 years. Today the village's E Estate District codifies that legacy: any annexed land that has not been heard before the Planning and Zoning Commission defaults to the 5-acre Estate District. The municipal slogan, Living with the Land, not on it, is also the village's enforcement philosophy at every planning and zoning hearing.