Pekin’s celebration of its bicentennial this year coincides with the 175th anniversary of our community’s incorporation as a City under Illinois law. Pekin’s first settler Jonathan Tharp arrived in 1824, and just 25 years later, on Aug. 20, 1849, the people of the Town of Pekin voted to incorporate as a city – 175 years ago last month.

The city of Pekin is just one of 1,299 Illinois incorporated municipalities (of which there are three kinds: villages, towns, and cities). Prior to Pekin’s achieving city status, only nine municipalities in Illinois had incorporated as cities: Cairo (Jan. 9, 1818), Chicago (March 4, 1837), Alton (July 31, 1837), Quincy and Springfield (Feb. 3, 1840), Nauvoo (Feb. 1, 1841), Galena (April 26, 1841), Peoria (April 21, 1845), and Rock Island (Feb. 12, 1849).

Before Pekin incorporated as a city, of course, our community had previously incorporated as a Town in the mid-1830s. In William H. Bates 1870 history of Pekin, Bates tells of the results of Pekin’s first town elections on July 9, 1835, in which Joshua C. Morgan (1804-1849), a notable early Tazewell County pioneer who held several county offices simultaneously – and whose wife had died in the cholera epidemic of July 1834 – was elected President of Pekin’s Town Board. The position of town board president is comparable to the mayor of a city, only the president is selected from among the town’s board of trustees by a board vote rather than by a vote of the town’s eligible voters. As reported last month in the Pekin Hometown Voice, flowers were placed on Morgan’s grave in Prairieville Cemetery, Lee County, Illinois, this summer as a part of Pekin’s Bicentennial celebrations.

Very curiously, however, Bates never mentioned the actual vote to incorporate as a Town and its date. It turns out that for some reason the incorporation vote was not legally recorded. That omission made it necessary for Pekin’s officials to ask the Illinois General Assembly to retroactively legalize the incorporation of the Town of Pekin, which the General Assembly did by a special act passed on Jan. 19, 1837.

The wording of “An act to legalize the incorporation of Pekin” (See “Incorporation Laws of the State of Illinois 1836-37,” pages 3-4) explains that “the citizens of the town of Pekin, in the county of Tazewell, did, on the second day of July, A. D. 1835, meet and determine, by vote, that they would become incorporated, according to the provisions of an act entitled ‘An act to incorporate such towns as may wish to be incorporated,’ approved March 1st, 1831.” Nevertheless, “by accident or mistake, the certified statement of the polls of said meeting was lost and have (sic – has) not been filed and recorded in the clerk’s office of the county commissioners’ court in said county as the said act directs.”

The act then goes on to declare that the town of Pekin shall not be considered to be an illegally incorporated town – i.e., no one would be prosecuted or sued over what had happened, nor would the Town Board be disbanded. The act retroactively “declared legal and valid” all of the official acts of Pekin’s board of trustees since July 2, 1835. Finally, the town of Pekin was “hereby declared an incorporated town under the above recited act, any omission or mistake in the incorporation of said town to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Consequently, although the people of Pekin intended to incorporate on July 2, 1835, in point of law Pekin did not really become an incorporated town until Jan. 19, 1837, at which point the unwittingly illegal acts of the Town Board of Pekin were retroactively legalized by the General Assembly. Notably, the date of the retroactive legalization of the Town of Pekin was exactly seven years after Pekin was platted and named as an unincorporated settlement.

Jumping ahead 11½ years to Pekin’s decision to incorporate as a City, we find that William H. Bates’ 1870 history of Pekin notes that in 1849, prior to Pekin becoming a City, the Illinois General Assembly agreed to move the county seat from Tremont back to Pekin. Bates then says that on Aug. 7, 1849, the Town Board, convened by Town Board President William S. Maus, approved a resolution to take a census of Pekin “preparatory to city organization under the general act of incorporation allowing towns of fifteen hundred inhabitants the privilege of adopting the Springfield or Quincy charters if a majority of the inhabitants, upon due notice, vote in favor of it.”

Only two days later, on Aug. 9, 1849, the census results were reported to the board, and, having found that Pekin contained at least 1,500 people (the minimum population required for a community to incorporate as a city), it was “ordered that two weeks’ notice, to be published in the ‘Mirror,’ for an election, to be held on the 20th of August, 1849, to vote for or against the City of Pekin.” According to Bates, the vote to incorporate was unanimous.

After that vote, Pekin’s next steps would have been to record the census and vote results, to notify the State of Illinois, and to hold a mayoral and city council election. Upon verifying that Pekin had fulfilled all of the stipulations of the law governing the incorporation of cities, the Illinois General Assembly would then issue Pekin a city charter that matched those of Quincy and Springfield.

Pekin’s first city election took place on Sept. 24, 1849, when a local newspaperman named Bernard Bailey (1812-1903) was elected as Pekin’s first mayor, heading a City Council of four aldermen: John Atkinson, David Kenyon, William Maus, and Jacob Riblet. In those days, municipal offices were held for one-year terms. Being reelected in 1850, Pekin’s first mayor served only until Oct. 25, 1850, when he resigned at the City Council’s request. Apparently the council was concerned that Bailey was paying more attention to running his newspaper, The Tazewell Mirror, than to his duties as city mayor.

Bailey and his wife Arabella raised a family of 14 children in Pekin, but later moved to Peoria, where Bailey is buried in Springdale Cemetery. Mayor Bailey’s obituary appeared in the Bloomington Pantagraph on Aug. 29, 1903, which announced “Bernard Bailey Dead. First Mayor of Pekin Passes Away at the Age of 92.” He died at Peoria Hospital “from the effects of a stroke of paralysis.” The obituary notes that Bailey moved to Peoria about 10 years before his death, but several of his children then still lived in Pekin.

It is a remarkable historical fact that a search of the acts of the Illinois General Assembly for the years 1849 and 1850 turns up no trace of a city charter being issued to Pekin following the Aug. 20, 1849 vote. It is not until Jan. 24, 1851, that the General Assembly passed “An act to approve and extend the corporate powers of the city of Pekin” – the sort of bill by which the General Assembly approved the incorporation of cities, towns, and villages, and granted cities their charters.

Why the unusual delay in the granting of Pekin’s charter? The answer can be divined from Section 1 of this act, which says (emphasis added):

“Be it enacted by the people of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly:

“SEC. 1. That all the acts of the president and trustees of the town of Pekin, in the county of Tazewell, and the inhabitants thereof, in adopting and organizing the said town of Pekin into the city of Pekin, under the act of 1849 regulating towns and cities, and all the acts of the officers of said city of Pekin done and performed by virtue of said city authority, shall be and the same are hereby completely and fully legalized, ratified, confirmed and approved, the same as though the said city of Pekin had been duly incorporated by said act of 1849 regulating towns and cities, with all the powers and authority of the cities of Springfield and Quincy; and said city of Pekin shall, in all things, have and enjoy all the powers and authority conferred by law on said cities of Springfield and Quincy.”

The words in italics imply that for some reason, the City of Pekin was not duly incorporated in 1849 despite the acts that the Pekin Town Board had taken that year to organize Pekin as an incorporated city. Therefore, just as in 1837, the Illinois General Assembly once again had to retroactively legalize an act of incorporation for Pekin.

But why was it necessary for the General Assembly to retroactively legalize Pekin’s incorporation as a city? We can only speculate and guess about that. The General Assembly’s act of Jan. 24, 1851, does not inform us why Pekin was not, contrary to its intention, duly incorporated in 1849.

Was it that Pekin had again failed to record the incorporation vote, just as in 1837? Was there a question about whether or not Pekin’s population was really at least 1,500 persons? Had someone in the town government of Pekin failed to notify the State of Illinois that Pekin had voted to become to city? Did the cholera epidemic of 1849 disrupt the usual functioning of municipal and state operations?

Whatever the reason, the historical record shows that both times Pekin sought to incorporate, errors were made that invalidated the incorporation and made it necessary for the General Assembly to approve a retroactive legalization.