In reviewing Pekin’s 1876 U.S. Centennial celebrations last week, we examined what had been published about it in the 30 June 1876 edition of the Tazewell County Republican newspaper. As we noted then, that issue of the Tazewell County Republican is just one of many 19th-century newspapers from Tazewell County are available for researchers at the Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society.
Although the Pekin Public Library’s collection of old, historic newspapers is not as extensive as that of the TCGHS, even so the library’s offering is far from insubstantial. The microfilms of the Pekin Daily Times (1914-2018) are the core of the library’s local history collection of newspapers. Besides the Pekin Times microfilms, the library’s website provides access for Pekin Public Library card hardholders to numerous newspapers via NewsBank, including the Pekin Daily Times from 2001 to the present (text only) or from 2019 to the present (full images of each newspaper page). More recently, Newspapers.com digitized the Pekin Daily Times from 1983 to the present, but that database is accessible only to paid subscribers.
Besides the abovementioned microfilm and digital collections, the library’s archive is also home to several print editions of Pekin and Tazewell County newspapers from the 1800s and early 1900s. A number of those papers are from 1896 and 1902 and were preserved in the Pekin Carnegie Library’s 1902 cornerstone time capsule, but several other individual print editions of vintage local papers have been added to the library’s archive over the decades. Naturally, due to their age and the limited lifespan of newsprint, these papers are quite fragile and not accessible to regular public access, though the library has temporarily displayed some of them from time to time. Those archived papers include individual editions of the Pekin Weekly Times, the Pekin Evening Tribune, the Pekin Freie Presse (Pekin’s most successful German-language paper, dating from the time when the majority of Pekin’s citizens were German immigrants or children of German immigrants), and a historic reprint of the first edition of the Pekin Daily Times, In addition, the framed first edition of the Pekin Daily Times that formerly was displayed for decades in the Daily Times’ newsroom (donated to the library when the newspaper left Pekin) is displayed in the Local History Room.
One of the library oldest local newspaper editions is a copy of the Tazewell Republican that was printed in Pekin on Friday, 13 April 1860. This newspaper — only the eighth edition of what was then a brand new paper — was donated to the library several years ago by Timothy Williams, son of beloved Pekin old-timer Roy Williams (1919-2018). Among the notable news items in that issue was an announcement looking ahead to the Republican Party’s national convention that was planned for May 1860. It was at that convention where Abraham Lincoln of Illinois would win his party’s nomination for U.S. president. Being a Republican Party-affiliated newspaper from a county that Lincoln often visited, this issue understandably expresses editorial support for Lincoln’s candidacy.
Although the Tazewell Republican was only founded in the Spring of 1860, it was the successor of an earlier weekly newspaper, the Tazewell Mirror, the county’s first newspaper. The Mirror first went to print in 1836, but in October 1848 the publisher John S. Lawrence sold it to John Smith, who in turn sold it to Pekin’s first mayor Bernard Bailey in 1850. A year later, however, Smith partnered with Adam Henderson and bought back The Mirror. After six months, Henderson left as Smith’s partner, after which Smith as sole publisher continued to print the newspaper until 1854. That year, Smith sold the Mirror and then in 1855 he left Pekin and moved to Toulon in Stark County, Illinois, taking his printing press with him. Thomas J. Pickett then procured his own printing press and revived the newspaper, calling it the Tazewell County Mirror.
Five years later, Republicans in Tazewell County saw a need to publish their own party-affiliated newspapers, so Smith returned to Pekin, purchased the Tazewell County Mirror, and renamed it the Tazewell Republican (the name later being expanded to Tazewell County Republican). At one time, the Republican was one of Pekin’s leading newspapers.
The library’s Local History collection also includes a photocopy of the front page of another early Pekin newspaper, one of that in the “lineage” that led up to the founding of the Pekin Daily Times. Now, the Daily Times dates its debut as a daily paper to 3 Jan. 1881. Before that, the Times was a weekly paper, having published under the name of the Pekin Weekly Times since October 1873. However, the history of the Pekin Daily Times reaches back even further than that. As Charles C. Chapman says in his 1879 “History of Tazewell County,” page 43, the Times was the successor or offspring of several earlier newspapers that were printed in Pekin. The story begins in 1850 with the Tazewell Mirror, which at the time was the only newspaper printed in Tazewell County. In the fall of 1850, a rival paper, the Pekin Weekly Reveille began printing.
Then in 1854, both the Mirror and the Reveille were bought by Merrill C. Young, who consolidated them under the name of the Pekin Weekly Plaindealer. The Plaindealer was printed until the winter of 1856, when Young sold it to Thomas J. Pickett, who renamed it the Pekin Weekly Register while also reviving the Mirror. After changing hands several times, the Register finally was purchased in 1873 by W. T. Dowdall and Joseph B. Irwin, who rechristened it the Pekin Weekly Times, and then changed it to a daily paper on Jan. 3, 1881.
In its appearance and overall feel, this 24 July 1856 edition of the Plaindealer doesn’t bear much resemblance to what many today would expect from a newspaper. In fact, like most newspapers of that period, it doesn’t have that much news in it. This excerpt should give a good idea of most of its contents:
“A FEW HINTS TO BACHELORS. – If you intend to marry – if you think your happiness will be increased and your interest advanced by matrimony – be sure and look where you are going. Join yourself with no woman who is selfish, for she will sacrifice you – with no one who is fickle, for she will become estranged – have naught to do with a proud one, for she will despise you – nor with an extravagant one for she will ruin you. Leave a coquette to the fools that flatter around her; let her own fireside accommodate a scold. Come not near a woman who is slatternly, for she will disgust you; and flee from one whom loves scandal as you would flee from old Nick himself!”
The oldest newspaper in the Pekin Public Library’s archives is not a local newspaper at all. It is an old copy (perhaps a later reprint) of the 10 April 1775 edition of the Boston Gazette & Country Journal, a newspaper from colonial Massachusetts, that was donated to the library some years ago. The date of this newspaper is just nine days before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the conflicts that sparked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
