Photos by Jared L. Olar, Pekin Public Library Local History Program Coordinator
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Photos by Jared L. Olar, Pekin Public Library Local History Program Coordinator
By Jared L. Olar
Local History Program Coordinator
The New Year A.D. 2024 promises to be a memorable one for Pekin, with celebrations and special activities being planned throughout the year to mark our community’s Bicentennial.
One hundred years ago, Pekin put on a multi-day festival and grand parade to celebrate its centennial. That and much more is in the works for Pekin’s bicentennial.
The first formal event being a “State of the City” program set for next month at noon, 19 Jan. 2024, at the Pekin Moose Lodge, when Pekin Mayor Mary Burress will deliver her first State of the City address.
The date of this event is chosen for its special significance in Pekin’s early history.
Pekin has traditionally counted the years of its history from the year 1824, when a white settler from Urbana, Ohio, named Jonathan Tharp (1794-1844) arrived at the future site of Pekin, building his cabin at a location that is now occupied by the former Franklin School building at the foot of Broadway. Pekin grew from that seed planted by Tharp.
Tharp was joined the following year by family members and other settlers, and by 1829 the nascent pioneer community set to work surveying and platting the lots and streets of a new “Town Site.” The settlers officially voted on a name for their town on 19 Jan. 1830, and chose the name “Pekin,” evidently in honor of Peking (Beijing), China. Seven years after that, on 19 Jan. 1837, the Illinois General Assembly formalized the incorporation of Pekin as a Town under Illinois law. Hence the decision to inaugurate Pekin’s Bicentennial year on Jan. 19.
The Pekin Bicentennial Celebration Committee, co-chaired by Gary Gillis and Terri Gambetti, first convened on Thursday, 12 Jan. 2023, and since then its members, representing various civic organizations, community groups, and municipal bodies, has been meeting each second Thursday of the month to coordinate plans for Pekin’s Bicentennial. Represented organizations include the Pekin Area Chamber of Commerce, the Dirksen Congressional Center, Pekin Main Street, Pekin Public School District 108, Pekin High School District 303, the Pekin Park District, the Pekin Civic Chorus, Artistic Community Theatre of Pekin, Lakeside Cemetery Association, the Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society, the Pekin Public Library, and others.
Just as Pekin’s Centennial celebration was a multi-day fair in early July 1924, so the primary Bicentennial community event is being planned for early July 2024, with Pekin Bicentennial fireworks on July 6 in addition to the annual Independence Day fireworks on July 4. The Marigold Festival in September will also have a Bicentennial theme, and last summer’s downtown Community Picnic will return in June, with a community photograph being planned for June 15. Pekin’s schools are also planning to tailor their social studies lessons to Pekin’s history in the fall of 2024. The Pekin Civic Chorus will have auditions at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 7, at Pekin Community High School, for the Pekin Civic Bicentennial Chorus, which will present its “Singing With the Stars” program from May 30 to June 2.
Other events being planned include Pekin history geocaching to begin in April, and a Cemetery History Walk at Lakeside Mausoleum and Cemetery on Sunday, Oct. 27, from 2-5 p.m., featuring local high school speech and theater students portraying past figures of Pekin’s history who lie at rest in the mausoleum.
Also in the works for 2024’s celebrations are new welcome signs, and a contest for the redesign of the city’s flag. A grand banner reminiscent of Pekin’s 1924 Centennial banner is also to be designed, to be hung across downtown Court Street just as the 1924 banner was.
The Committee wishes not only to spotlight and celebrate Pekin’s 200-year history, but also is thinking of ways to encourage and enable Pekin’s residents to contribute their own stories and memories of their lives and their family’s experiences growing up in Pekin.
The official internet homepage of Pekin’s Bicentennial is now being prepared, and is expected to go live this coming Tuesday, Jan. 2. When it is ready, the website will be the go-to place for news about Bicentennial events, along with information on Pekin’s 200 years of history. The Pekin Bicentennial homepage will be accessible online at Pekin200.com and PekinBicentennial.com.
Here at the Pekin Public Library’s “From the History Room” blog, the focus each week will be Pekin’s Bicentennial, with articles featuring significant and interesting events and notable people from Pekin’s past.
As it happens, next week is an important anniversary of one of the great tragedies of Pekin’s history: the 100th anniversary of the Corn Products Refinery explosion, which occurred 3 Jan. 1924, killing 42 and injuring 100. That will be the subject of next week’s “From the History Room” article.
This is a reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in May 2014, before the launch of this weblog.
Public grade school education in Pekin through the years
By Jared Olar
Local History Specialist
The founding pioneer settlers of Pekin believed it was very important to provide youth with a good education. So it was that in 1830, the year of Pekin’s founding, the town’s first school opened. A log cabin built by Thomas Snell, it was located on the west side of Second Street between Elizabeth and St. Mary streets, at the southwest corner of Elizabeth and Second. Snell’s son John was the teacher.
Pekin’s first school house also has the distinction of temporarily serving as a fort during the Black Hawk War of 1832. The town’s inhabitants quickly threw up a stockade around the building. Thankfully, Fort Doolittle, as it was called, never had to be used, which was an especially good thing since, as the publications on Pekin’s early history relate, the fort’s builders had forgotten to provide it with a water supply.
A few years later, Pekin’s second school, called the Cincinnati School, was built at the corner of Franklin and Third streets. A one-story frame house situated near the lower end of the long vanished Bitzel’s Lake (which later would be drained to make way for the railroad), Cincinnati School would get surrounded by water every spring, so temporary bridges would be placed to enable the students to get to the school, or else the shorter pupils would have to be carried by the taller ones.
Pekin’s first brick school was Pekin Academy, a two-story building on Tharp Place where a Baptist elder named Gilbert S. Bailey taught young men and women. The structure was erected in 1836, according to William H. Bates, and later historical works say the academy opened in 1852.
Bates also quotes from early town records from 1840 that refer to a school that operated out of the old Methodist Church. In addition, the St. Matthew’s School opened in the early 1850s, a private school that operated as a reformatory, known in town as the “bad boy’s school.”
These early schools were the predecessors of the Pekin and Cincinnati Union School District, which in turn was ancestral to the present District 108 and District 303. The 1860 U.S. Census says Pekin then had 12 school houses and 503 pupils – a tally that includes religious schools. The next year, the 1861 Root’s Pekin City Directory listed six “free schools” in Pekin and Cincinnati Union School District. Those schools were:
While the city’s public schools were operated collectively as a school district, the formal organization of a state-recognized public school district did not come until the General Assembly passed the Pekin School Charter & Law in 1869. That law governed the operation of Pekin School District until the 1920s, when the city took steps to separate the administration of the high school from the elementary schools, creating District 108, legal successor of Pekin School District, and District 303, the high school district.
A year after the formation of Pekin School District, the 1870 Pekin City Directory lists the following public schools:
Subsequently, the school district would build a succession of elementary and junior high schools, many of which have since been demolished: Lincoln School (1876, extensively remodeled and expanded in 1913, later became Good Shepherd Lutheran School, demolished in 2010), East Side School or Douglas School (1881-2, replaced in 1924, demolished in 1988), Garfield School (1894, demolished in 1981), Franklin School (1923, replaced in 1936, now a private office building), Jefferson School (1906, replaced in 1976), McKinley School (1919, demolished), Roosevelt School (1923, demolished), Fearn Wilson School (1949), Edison Junior High School (1954), C.B. Smith School (1956), Sunset Hills School (1962, recently renamed Scott Altman School), Willow School (1962), L.E. Starke School (1966), Broadmoor Junior High School (1976), Dirksen School (1984, housed in Broadmoor), and most recently, Wilson Intermediate School (built adjacent to old Wilson).
Shown below are photographs and images of many of Pekin’s former schools which have been razed and/or replaced.