Historic Adventure Quest

Site Coordinates: N 40˚34'08.9" W 89˚38'54.9"

This is one of 10 caches (a hidden container) placed around historic sites in Pekin. These sites along with 10 other sites will provide letters or numbers you'll need to ultimately unscramble a prominent name and year in Pekin's history. Once you've obtained all 20 letters and numbers and unscrambled the name and year, submit your answer to be entered into a drawing for a locally 3-D printed "flat" Everett, $50 in Chamber Checks and other Pekin swag!

Please be courteous and aware of your surroundings (do not disrupt landscaping or destroy anything during your search) and place each cache back how you found it to ensure it remains hidden. All caches are on public property, placed with permission. Please be stealthy & courteous!

Practice CITO (cache-in-trash-out: a way to help keep our environment clean) & happy caching! We hope you enjoy this historic tour of Pekin & participate in other events throughout 2024 to celebrate this milestone.

A special thank you to the United Way of Pekin for sponsoring the cache containers.

This week we’ll take a look at Pekin’s post offices. Perhaps most Pekin residents know that before the current post office on Broadway near downtown Pekin, there was an “Old Post Office” in a stately old building near the Tazewell County Courthouse. But by no means are those the only post offices Pekin has seen.

Pekin’s first post office opened on Feb. 20, 1832, and Robert Alexander was Pekin’s first postmaster, according to “Pekin: A Pictorial History,” page 90. It is not stated where that post office was located, but “Pekin: A Pictorial History” goes on to say that prior to 1850 the post office “operated from various and sundry sites including the general store, a tavern, a hotel and several rented quarters.”

The 1949 Pekin Centenary elaborates on that point on page 121: “The location of the Pekin post office during the early years seems to have had nothing on the proverbial rolling stone, for one early chronicle tells that ‘it is impossible to name all the locations.’ We do know that about 1866, it was located on the south side of the 300 block on Court Street about three doors from the railroad.”