This is a reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in April 2015, before the launch of this weblog.
J. L. Quate, Pekin’s telegraph operator
By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
The March 2015 issue of The Tazewell County Genealogical & History Society Monthly, page 1251, provided the following snippet from the Oct. 13, 1859 edition of The Tazewell Register, one of the predecessor newspapers of the Pekin Daily Times:
“Mr. J. L. Quate, the gentlemanly operator of the Illinois and Mississippi telegraph company, has removed his office to the front room corner of Court and Second streets. This he has fitted up in a very neat and convenient manner, and Pekin can now boast of as tasty and well arranged telegraph office as there is in this section of the state. Mr. Quate, by his integrity and industry has won the confidence of the business community, and through his instrumentality the business of the company seems to be rapidly increasing.”
This notice was published only 12 years after Samuel Morse patented his remarkable invention that made long-distance communication faster than ever, indicating just how rapid had been the adoption of this new technology. The company that employed J. L. Quate in Pekin, the Illinois and Mississippi Telegraph Company, had been organized in Peoria only 10 years prior to the publication of this notice – just two years after Morse secured his patent.
The telegraph arrived in Pekin not long after the formation of the Illinois and Mississippi Telegraph Company. As has been mentioned before in this column space, it was around that time that Abraham Lincoln first saw a telegraph machine in the lobby of the old Tazewell House hotel, formerly located at the northeast corner of Court and Front streets. The Tazewell Register notice from 1859 presumably was to inform the public that the telegraph had moved from the hotel to a new office a block east on Court Street.
As for Mr. Quate the telegraph operator, he appears in the following year in the U.S. federal census, which lists him as “James L. Quate,” age 24, “Tel Operator,” born in New York. Listed with Quate was his wife Emma, 21, also born in New York, their 10-month-old son Albert, born in Illinois, and James’ younger brother “Ruben,” 23, born in New York. (As an interesting aside, Pekin’s census enumerator that summer was none other than former county sheriff William A. Tinney, “Uncle Bill Tinney,” proprietor of the Tazewell House where the telegraph previously had been located.) The 1850 federal census shows James and his brother Reuben living in Summerfield, Michigan, with their parents Samuel and Amy Quate, ages 45 and 34, respectively. Samuel was a Scots-Irish immigrant who had been born in Ireland, while Amy was a native of New York. As for James’ wife Emma, her maiden name was McCoy, another Scots-Irish name.
After the 1860 census, J. L. Quate did not remain long in Pekin. In the following year, the United States had broken apart and was embroiled in the Civil War, in which the use of the telegraph would be crucial in military operations. William R. Plum’s 1893 book, “The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States,” page 117, informs us that Quate served in the Union Army’s Telegraph Corps in Missouri, being assigned as a military telegrapher on Aug. 25, 1861, to Jefferson Barracks.
It’s not clear what became of James and his wife Emma after that, but their son Albert later moved to California, dying in Logan, Utah, on Dec. 7, 1938, having had at least one son and one daughter.
