In this week’s continuation of the history of 405 Willow St., we will delve into the story of Dietrich C. Smith (1840-1914) and his family who lived in the house at that site. As we saw last time, D. C. Smith was the one who had the house at 405 Willow St. built, thus the house at first was commonly known as the D. C. Smith mansion.
A search of U.S. Census records provides the following survey of the D.C. Smith family from 1870 to 1900:
1870: Dederick Smith, 30, b. Hannover, banker, $2,000 real estate, $10,000 personal estate; Caroline Smith, 26, b. Illinois, keeping house; Walter F. Smith, 5, b. Illinois; Ernest F. Smith, 1, b. Illinois; Henry Froeber, 18, b. Illinois, photographer; Clara Block, 22, b. Hannover, domestic servant.
At this time, D. C. Smith and his family were not yet living at 405 Willow St. The 1870-71 city directory says D. C. Smith was then living at the northeast corner of Capitol and Caroline streets, so he was already living in the general area where he would later build the house at 405 Willow St.
1880: D. C. Smith, 40, b. Hanover, banker; wife Caroline Smith, 36, b. Illinois; son Walter Smith, 15, b. Illinois, at school; daughter (?) Mary Smith, 14, b. Hendostin (?), father b. Kentucky, at school; son Earnest Smith, 12, b. Illinois, at school; Mary Smith, 9, b. Illinois, at school; son Dedrick Smith, 7, b. Illinois, at school; daughter Carry Smith, 5; son Justin Smith, 1.
It is known that the D. C. Smith family were then living at 405 Willow St., but this census record erroneously says they were living on “Catharine” Street. It is worth noting that in 1880 the Velde family lived near D. C. Smith and his family, and we again find them living near each other in the 1920 census. The reason they lived near each other is because D. C. Smiths’ mother Margaret was a Velde.
1900: Deetrich Smith, 60, b. April 1840 in Germany, banker, immigrated 1841, naturalized citizen; wife Caroline Smith, 54, b. Dec. 1845 in Illinois, married 36 years; son Carroll Smith, 16, b. March 1884 in Illinois, at school; son Arthor Smith, 13, b. Feb. 1887 in Illinois, at school; servant Hanna Olenga, 26, b. Jan. 1874 in Illinois.
That brings us up to just a few years before the fire at the D. C. Smith mansion.
D. C. Smith’s full name was Dietrich Conrad Smith, who was one of the Smith brothers who were very prominent in Pekin’s history. The Smith brothers were a family of German immigrants who came from Hamsverum in Ostfriesland (today in northwestern Germany) and settled in Pekin in the mid-19th century. As their family business grew more prosperous, several other business ventures were spun off, including a local bank.
The bank’s first president in fact was D. C. Smith, who was the youngest of the Smith brothers. His occupation of banker, indicated in the census records, no doubt enabled him to build his grand mansion. Dietrich Conrad Smith’s parents were Conrad H. Smith (Coenraad Smid) and Margaret van der Velde. D. C. Smith married Caroline “Carrie” Pieper (1844-1923), with whom he had a family of nine sons and three daughters.
Besides his involvement in his family’s businesses, D. C. Smith also was wounded in battle as a Union officer in the Civil War, afterwards being elected successively to the Illinois General Assembly and to the U.S. House of Representatives. He died April 18, 1914, and was buried Pekin in Lakeside Cemetery, Pekin.
Phineas Camp Headley’s 1882 “Public Men of To-Day,” pp. 569-70, says:
“At the breaking out of the Civil war, having just reached his majority, he entered the Union army with the Eighth Illinois Volunteer infantry, a ‘three-months’ regiment, and re-enlisted for a term of three years in the following July. He was engaged in the battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, and was severely wounded in the battle of Pittsburg Landing, which compelled him to resign his commission of Second Lieutenant of Company ‘Y,’ which he then held. He subsequently returned to the service as Captain of Company C of the 139th Illinois Volunteer infantry, and served until the expiration of the regiment’s term of enlistment.
“In 1863 Captain Smith became a member of the firm of Smith, Velde & Co., of Pekin, and three years later a partner in the firm of Teis, Smith & Co., bankers, of that city, and has continued that business connection to the present time. He is also a member of the firm of T. & H. Smith & Co., and Smith, Hippen & Co., the Pekin Plough Company. He has also been interested in several railroad corporations, as officer, director, and member of a construction company. Captain Smith has been for a long time prominent in Sabbath-school work in his county and throughout the State; also in the educational enterprises of the German Methodist Episcopal Church of the West; and he is now President of the Board of Trustees of the German College, at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa.
“He has been honored by the people with the offices of Alderman, School Inspector, Supervisor, and Member of the General Assembly of Illinois. While in the State Legislature he interested himself especially in measures looking to the improvement of the water-ways by the government, and generally in all matters of public importance. He was elected to the Forty-seventh Congress, as a Republican, by a vote of 16,431 against 16,113 for his Democratic Greenback opponent.”
Russ Dodge of Find-A-Grave provides this summary of his career in business and politics:
“After the war Dietrich Smith became a successful banker and financier, and invested in construction and administration of railroads. He served a term in the Illinois State Legislature, then was elected as a Republican to represent Illinois’ 13th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1881 to 1883. Defeated for the seat by William McKendree Springer in 1882, he returned to his banking career in his hometown of Pekin, Illinois, where he passed away in 1914.”
As we saw in a previous installment in this series, the old Smith mansion was severely damaged in a fire in the early years of the 20th century. This fire led D. C. Smith to deed the house to A. L. Champion, trustee, on 10 April 1907. Judging from the evidence of the old Pekin city directories, the fire likely took place between 1904, the last year Smith is listed as living at 405 Willow St., and 1907, when Smith was living at 339 Buena Vista. The address of 405 Willow St. does not even appear in the 1907 directory. This suggests that 1906 was the year of the fire.
The title history shows that the house passed in rapid succession through a series of owners, from the trustee A. L. Champion in 1907 to Blanche Bleeker by November of 1911. The city directories show that the Bleeker family were the next to live in the house, and next week we will see what we can find out about the Bleekers.
