This is a reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in April 2014, before the launch of this weblog.
A centennial pageant for Mackinaw
By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
A few years ago, we reviewed the early history of Mackinaw. This week we’ll have another glimpse of Mackinaw’s history courtesy of a booklet included in the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room collection.
Only 19 pages in length, the booklet is the “Historical Program to Commemorate the One-Hundredth Anniversary of Mackinaw, Illinois,” prepared and published on the occasion of Mackinaw’s centennial celebration that took place on Thursday, Sept. 1, 1927.
Despite its brevity, the booklet packs an impressive amount of information within its covers, including a seven-page historical essay with photographs, as well as the complete program and schedule of the centennial’s events.
The celebration’s main event was a “Pageant Depicting the History of Old Mackinaw, given under the auspices of the Mackinaw Woman’s Club.” The pageant’s complete program and cast list is printed on pages 12 to 16 of this booklet. It opened with a prologue scene in which the Rev. R. M. Hutchinson, in the role of the “Spirit of History,” intoned the words, “I am the Spirit of History and these are my Handmaids: Courage, Vision, Industry, and Co-operation, without which no community can progress. We shall unfold before you the epochs that have made up the history of Old Mackinaw.”
Then followed a series of nine scenes that took the audience through Mackinaw’s history, beginning with the Pottawatomi village of Chief Machina (or Mackina) in 1790, then portraying the arrival of Thomas Orendorff and his family in the 1820s, followed by a scene in the Allensworth home in 1831 (in which the players were all descendants of the characters they portrayed). The pageant then leaped ahead to 1846, showing the wedding of Sallie Allensworth and Abraham Sargent, which was attended by a certain attorney named Abraham Lincoln, family friend of the Sargents.
The next scene depicted the effect that the California Gold Rush of 1849 had on the men of Mackinaw. After that, the pageant presented a pair of scenes on the start of the Civil War in 1861 and its conclusion in 1865. After a presentation of a scene from the Pomona Fair of 1893, the pageant’s final scene, set in 1908, depicted Mackinaw’s first “Harvest Home Picnic.”
Interspersed during the pageant were three “tableaux” – that is, individual scenes in which the actors remained silent and motionless, like living pictures or figures from a museum display. The first tableau was the pioneers’ planting of their first corn, the second tableau was of the marriage of Sallie Allensworth and Abraham Sargent, and the third was of the 1865 celebration of the end of the Civil War.
At the conclusion of the pageant, the Rev. Hutchinson returned as the Spirit History and bid a farewell blessing to the audience with the words, “Prosperity and Happiness to Mackinaw and her citizens, May the blessings of the Past continue with you, And the joys of life ever be yours.”
