19. Pekin Municipal Building
Site Coordinates: N 40˚34'06.3" W 89˚38'59.6"
Your Clue: "There are vertical windows on either side of the entrance door. To find the letter you need for the puzzle, count the windows (both sides) and use the corresponding key below."
These informational sites along with 10 cache sites placed around Pekin will provide letters or numbers you'll need to unscramble a prominent name and important year in Pekin's history. Once you've unscrambled the name and year, submit your answer to be entered into a drawing for a one-of-a-kind, locally 3-D printed "flat" Everett, $50 in Chamber checks & some official Pekin swag!
Please be courteous and respectful of your surroundings! We hope you enjoy this historic tour of Pekin & participate in other events throughout 2024 to celebrate this milestone.
If you have any questions, please email us at pekinhistoricadventurequest@gmail.com.
A Bit of History...
The saga of Pekin's three city halls
Although Pekin was incorporated as a city in 1849, Pekin had no a literal “city hall” for the first 35 years of its history. The establishment of a permanent city hall is a story of the triumph of principle over privilege.
In its review of Pekin’s history during the middle to latter 1800s, the 1949 Pekin Centenary says, “Politics in city government was often the politics of privilege. When a new administration took office, it was customary for a complete turnover of city jobs to be made forthwith, and not only of city jobs but of all the city’s business. This was generally transferred to the business houses of the aldermen, and in some occasions when no alderman happened to be in the particular business of which the city required service, one of them got into that business temporarily.”
This was popularly known as the “spoils system” (“To the victor belongs the spoils”). Then as now, there were calls for ethics reform in politics, but in those days most people casually accepted that the winner of an election, or the party in power, was entitled to appoint friends and cronies to key offices and to channel government work to political allies (practices still common today in America at local, state, and federal levels, despite attempted reforms).
