This is an updated reprint of a “From the Local History Room” column that first appeared in March 2015 before the launch of this weblog.
Tazewell County’s first woman deputy
By Jared Olar
Library assistant
The year 1916 saw two historical milestones in Tazewell County history. The better remembered milestone is that in the summer of that year, the new county courthouse was completed and formally dedicated. It has served the county ever since.
But it’s also worth remembering that 1916 was when the first woman was sworn in as a Tazewell County Sheriff’s deputy.
Tazewell’s first female deputy was Frances C. Wilson, a native of Mackinaw, born April 27, 1896 – so she was 20 years old when she became a deputy. Two years after her swearing in, she married a Pekin carpenter named Ben B. Jurgens on July 20, 1918, in Bloomington. She and Ben had a daughter named Carolyn. Ben, a World War I veteran, would later serve as secretary of Pekin’s Police and Fire Commission and regional vice president of the Illinois Association of Police and Fire Commissions.
The significant development of the appointment of a woman deputy is recorded on page 85 of the 1974 Pekin Sesquicentennial volume, where a photograph of a young Frances Wilson Jurgens is printed along with the caption, “Pictured at left is Pekin’s pioneer in women’s liberation – and the first woman Deputy Sheriff in this area. Francis (sic) Wilson Jurgens was sworn in by Sheriff John Wilson in 1916. The fact that he was her father had nothing to do with the appointment, of course.”
As the caption’s jocular tone indicates, the fact that the sheriff was her father had quite a lot to do with her appointment. While a woman serving as a deputy was highly unusual for that time, a sheriff had very wide discretion in his choice of deputies.
Furthermore, citizens then had different expectations of the county sheriff than we do today. Although the law does not require it, today it is expected that the sheriff will be a professional with significant law enforcement training and experience, but in the past the fact that almost anyone could be elected sheriff sometimes meant the sheriff had no prior police experience. On at least one occasion, the Tazewell County Sheriff was a retired school principal and superintendent.
Again, since one of the sheriff’s primary duties was operating the county jail, in past decades a newly elected sheriff and his family would move into the county jail, a building that included the sheriff’s residence. The sheriff’s wife would prepare the daily meals for the jail inmates. Since the job then had something of a “home-y” feel, it’s perhaps not as surprising that Sheriff John L. “Jack” Wilson would appoint one of his own daughters as a deputy.
After her stint as a deputy, Frances Wilson Jurgens did not disappear into married life and motherhood, but remained active in the community and in her church, Grace United Methodist Church of Pekin. She also was the first district committee-woman elected from her local unit of the American Legion Auxiliary after the Legion had been organized in September 1919.
Her life was cut short by illness at the age of 57 on March 19, 1954, when she died at her home, 617 S. 12th St., Pekin. She was buried in Lakeside Cemetery. The fact that her published obituary includes a single-column photograph, at a time when obituary photographs were still uncommon in the Pekin Daily Times, indicates that she was well-known and somewhat prominent in her community. Her husband Ben survived by another 17 years, dying on June 17, 1971, at the age of 78.
