Back in May of this year, a collection of 1924 and 1925 Tazewell County Yearbooks were discovered while staff of the Office of the Tazewell County Clerk and Recorder of Deeds were reorganizing the secure vaults in the basement of the McKenzie Building.
Since the Tazewell County government did not need so many copies of these old county yearbooks, Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman decided to distribute copies of the yearbooks to area libraries and historical societies at the same time that he sent out the newly published 2023 Tazewell County Yearbook.
Ackerman donated five 1924 yearbooks and six 1925 yearbooks to the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Collection. These yearbooks are handy pocket-sized (or wallet-sized) volumes, about 6 inches by 3 inches. They were printed on the Pekin Daily Times’ press.
The county has been updating its yearbook since 1911, which is when the Tazewell County Clerk’s collection of county government yearbooks begins. The yearbook mainly serves to keep an updated directory of officeholders and staff in Tazewell County, not only including the Tazewell County Board of Supervisors but all other offices of the county government, as well as officeholders and staff at the Township level and elected state representatives.
In recent editions of the county yearbook, Ackerman has indulged his interest in local history by including an account of Tazewell County history.
For the purposes of this article, we will take a survey of the 1924 yearbook, which came out the same year that Pekin held its grand Centennial celebrations – and this is a good opportunity to remind our readers that Pekin’s Bicentennial year is less than four months away.
Turning now to the 1924 yearbook, we see that T. E. Soltermann (1887-1949) of Pekin – the “T. E.” stood for “Turner Edward” – was then the Tazewell County Clerk, and it is his name featured prominently on the front cover. The Tazewell County Board Chairman was J. P. Becker of Tremont, the County Sheriff was Emil Neuhaus, and County Judge was Charles Schaefer (after whom Schaeferville is named).
Pekin’s Mayor was then Benjamin Franklin Michael, who served from 1923 to 1927. Michael was later reelected in 1931, but died in office later that year.
The members of the County Board of Supervisors, listed by Township, were:
Pekin – Henry Birkenbusch, H. G. Gulon, H. G. Rust, and Fred H. Soldwedel
Fondulac – John Lindenfelser
Washington – Shelby M. Birkett
Morton – Jesse C. Moore
Tremont – J. B. Becker
Spring Lake – B. V. Golden of Manito
Sand Prairie – Frank A. Hofreiter of Green Valley
Mackinaw – G. A. Field
Little Mackinaw – Jake Haning of Minier
Groveland – J. B. Espenscheid
Elm Grove – Frank M. Hellmann
Dillon – S. A. Koch
Delavan – H. B. Price
Deer Creek – L. H. Rogers
Cincinnati – Edward Mitchell
Boynton – George J. Betzelberger
Malone – Paschal Allen.
By a printer’s error, Malone Township was inadvertently left off the 1924 yearbook’s list of Supervisors, and had to be manually added to the bottom of page 4 by an ink stamp.
Tazewell County’s population is listed as 38,540 (the 1920 U.S. Census’ figure), with the largest portion of the population living in Pekin Township (12,263), followed distantly by Washington Township (2,913), Fondulac Township (2,856), and Morton Township (2,031). Malone Township had the lowest population in the county in 1924, coming in at a mere 533 (which is hopefully not the reason for the printer’s error on page 4).
Pekin, the county seat, was also where most of the county’s population resided – 12,086 souls, with East Peoria as the second largest municipality (2,214 souls). The total assessment valuation of property in Pekin was $4,427,163, while East Peoria’s property was valued at a total of $1,633,175.
In great contrast to the present time when local journalism is now all but nonexistent, and newspapers are no longer produced or printed anywhere in Tazewell County, the county back in 1924 had 13 newspapers: the Pekin Daily Times, the Pekin Freie Presse (German language), the Green Valley Banner, the Delavan Advertiser-Times, the Deer Creek Progress, the East Peoria Post, the Tazewell County Reporter (Washington, Ill.), the Morton News, the Tremont News, the Hopedale Times-Review, the Armington Helper, the Minier News, and the Mackinaw Enterprise-Gazette.
The 1924 yearbook also reveals that the county was already becoming a Republican Party stronghold, with 7,679 voting for Warren G. Harding in contrast to the 3,640 who voted for the Democrat Gov. James M. Cox of Ohio. The Farmer-Labor Party’s candidate Parley P. Christensen of Utah scraped up 546 votes in Tazewell County, while the Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs of Indiana managed to eke out 229 Tazewell votes. The Prohibition Party was decidedly unpopular in our county – their candidate Aaron S. Watkins of Ohio got only 124 votes – but that was still much more impressive than the Socialist Labor Party, which got 19 votes, and the Single Taxation Party (advocating the abolition of every kind of tax except the property tax), which managed to get a whole 13 people in Tazewell County to vote for it.
