By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
Continuing our series on the history of the Pekin Public Library, this week we recall the challenges that the library faced by the mid-20th century due to the demographic “Baby Boom” during the years after World War II.
As related in previous installments of this series, Pekin built its first library in 1902-1903 with the help of industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Pekin’s Carnegie library was more than adequate for the community’s needs for the first four or five decades of its existence.
During those decades, the public’s library use gradually and steadily increased, and the library saw growth in its circulation numbers and the size of its collection. During the 1940s and 1950s, however, the Pekin Public Library experienced a surge in circulation, due in large part to the great increase in numbers of births across in the nation in those years.
By the 1950s it was glaringly obvious that the Carnegie library was no longer large enough to serve the community well. That is not surprising, considering that the library was built to serve a city of only about 8,500 persons. U.S. Census figures show that in the period from 1900 to 1940, the population of Pekin had increased from 8,420 to 19,407. In the decade from 1940 to 1950, that number grew to 21,858 – an increase of 2,451. But from 1950 to 1960, Pekin’s population leaped to 28,146, an increase of 6,288, almost three times as much as the increase during the previous decade.
Meanwhile the library was still the same size as it was when Paul O. Moratz designed it in 1902 and J. D. Handbury built it in 1902-03: less than 5,000 square feet. By 1960, the library’s collection included nearly 40,000 books, whereas the library had been designed to house no more than 15,000 books. By the end of the Sixties, the library’s collection had soared to about 45,000 books, three times the size for which the library building had been designed. Crowding was especially bad in the Children’s Department in the library basement.
In light of the Carnegie library’s crowding and space limitation problems that were exacerbated by the Post-War Baby Boom, the library board began looking ahead to a possible expansion or construction of a new library. With that in mind, in August of 1959 the board purchased all of the land between the corner of S. Fourth St. and the corner of S. Capitol St. That same year, Pekin Mayor J. Norman Shade proposed building a new library.
Then in Sept. 1962, Mayor Shade convened a special meeting of the library board at Pekin City Hall. During the meeting, Mayor Shade outlined his plan for a new library, which would also include a Dirksen Center to house the papers of Pekin’s beloved native son, U.S. Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen.
Shade said the new library was expected to cost $450,000, and would be paid for out of the library’s budget and reserves rather than by issuing bonds or increasing property taxes. “The library can save enough from its current operating budget to build a library within a period of five to eight years,” Shade said at the meeting.
About two months later, in Nov. 1962, the library board purchased the 89-year-old First United Presbyterian Church and several adjacent properties and residences for $69,000. The church, which relocated to a new structure on Highwood Ave. on Pekin’s east side, had long been the library’s next-door neighbor on the west side of S. Fourth St. With these acquisitions, the library had about one additional acre on which it could expand or build a new library.
After remaining in a somewhat inchoate form for several years, planning for a new library and Dirksen Congressional Center began to assume a definite form in January of 1964, when incorporation papers for the Dirksen Center were filed with the Illinois Secretary of State by Mayor J. Norman Shade, Walter V. McAdoo, and Harold E. Rainville.
From that point on, preparations for a new library really began to ramp up over the next few years. We will tell that part of the story next week.
