Somewhere between a scavenger hunt and a history lesson, the Historic Adventure Quest invites Pekin residents and visitors alike to lace up their walking shoes, charge their GPS devices, and rediscover the streets, buildings, and quiet corners that shaped this Illinois River town. It is part of the Pekin Bicentennial celebration, but it is also simply a good excuse to slow down and look closely at a place many people drive past every day without really seeing.
What the Quest Actually Involves
The premise is straightforward, but the execution rewards patience and observation. Participants use a GPS-enabled phone or dedicated device to travel to a set of twenty coordinates scattered across Pekin. At ten of those stops, small hidden containers — ranging from micro-sized to small — are tucked away for players to locate using their best geocaching instincts. At the other ten locations, there is no physical cache to find; instead, the site itself holds a clue, gathered simply by reading a marker, plaque, or piece of posted information.
Each of these twenty stops corresponds to a real piece of Pekin's past, from early pioneer homesteads to civic buildings that still serve the community today. The route works as a self-guided walking or driving tour, and even players who never solve the final puzzle come away having covered a surprising amount of local history in a single afternoon.
The Puzzle at the Heart of the Hunt
Every stop on the quest yields either a letter or a number. Collected together, in the correct order, these fragments spell out the name of a prominent woman in Pekin's history along with a significant year connected to the town's story. It is less a straightforward trivia contest and more a cipher that rewards careful note-taking at each location.
This structure means the Quest isn't just about finding containers — it's about paying attention. A visitor who rushes through a stop without reading the accompanying information, or who grabs a cache without noting its clue, risks missing a crucial piece of the final answer. The design encourages exactly the kind of unhurried curiosity that a bicentennial celebration is meant to inspire.
Put all the clues together to solve the puzzle — a prominent woman's name and an important year in Pekin's history are waiting to be unscrambled.
Twenty Stops Through Pekin's Past
The full route touches an impressively wide cross-section of the town's history. Along the way, participants encounter the Tharp Family Farm and the Jonathan Tharp Cabin, both tied to Pekin's earliest settlement years, as well as the Tazewell Building, the Pekin Public Library, and the Pekin Municipal Building, which anchor the town's civic and cultural life.
History buffs will recognize several stops tied to nationally significant figures and institutions, including the Abraham Lincoln Courthouse Marker and The Dirksen Congressional Center. Other stops highlight residential architecture and family homes central to Pekin's development, such as the Joshua Wagenseller House, the E.W. Wilson Home, and the Jonathan Haines Home.
The route also includes sites tied to commerce, transportation, and memory: the Farmers National Bank, the Old Chicago & Alton Railroad Depot, the Mineral Springs Park Pavilion, and the Pekin Civil War Memorial. A few stops celebrate quirkier local landmarks, like the self-proclaimed 'World's Greatest' Sundial, while others — including Nance Legins-Costley Park and the Nathan Cromwell Lot — connect directly to the deeper, sometimes difficult history that shaped the community.
- James Field/PCHS West Campus
- Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society
- Pekin's historic Post Office
Rounding out the list, these final stops reinforce just how many layers of Pekin's story are packed into a relatively compact downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.
Why These Particular Sites Matter
The selection of twenty sites was clearly not random. Together they trace a rough chronology of Pekin's growth — from early farm cabins and pioneer homesteads, through the era of railroads and riverfront commerce, into the age of civic institutions like libraries, courthouses, and municipal government. Walking or driving the full route offers a compressed but genuine sense of how the town evolved over two centuries.
Several stops also serve as quiet correctives to a history that hasn't always been fully told. Nance Legins-Costley, honored with her own park along the route, was a woman whose legal fight for freedom predates the Civil War and connects Pekin to a much larger national story about slavery and emancipation in Illinois. Including her park among the twenty stops signals that this Quest isn't only about celebrating buildings — it's about acknowledging the people who lived, struggled, and made history here.
Rules of the Trail
Because this is, at its core, a geocaching-style activity, it comes with the community's established etiquette. Anyone who locates one of the ten hidden containers is expected to return it exactly as found, ensuring the cache remains hidden and intact for the next participant. The organizers also ask players to practice CITO — cache-in, trash-out — meaning visitors should feel free to pick up a bit of litter along the way as a small act of stewardship for the sites they're exploring.
The container caches themselves were made possible through sponsorship from United Way of Pekin, a detail that underscores how much of this Quest depends on community cooperation rather than a single organizing body. It's a volunteer-driven, locally sustained project, and its success depends on participants treating each site with the same respect the organizers put into designing the route.
Solving the Puzzle and the Prize
Once a player has gathered all twenty letters and numbers and successfully unscrambled the woman's name and the significant year, the final step is submitting that answer. Correct submissions made by December 31st, 2024 are entered into a drawing held on January 6th, 2025. The prize package includes a one-of-a-kind, locally printed 3-D 'Flat Everett' figure, fifty dollars in Chamber Checks redeemable at numerous Pekin businesses, and a selection of official Pekin bicentennial swag.
Questions about the Quest, including issues locating a cache or clarifying a clue, can be directed to the organizers by email. Beyond the prize itself, the real reward of the Historic Adventure Quest is the experience of seeing Pekin through fresh eyes — noticing a marker you'd walked past a hundred times, or finally learning the story behind a building whose name you'd only ever seen in passing.
More Than a Game
At its heart, the Quest is one small piece of a much larger bicentennial effort to get residents engaged with their own town's story throughout the celebration year. It turns passive appreciation of local history into an active pursuit — one that requires showing up in person, reading carefully, and piecing together a puzzle that only makes sense once every stop has been visited.
Whether or not a participant ends up entering the prize drawing, the twenty stops leave behind a kind of informal map of Pekin's identity: pioneer cabins beside modern municipal buildings, a Civil War memorial not far from a public library, a congressional archive within reach of a small-town sundial. That range, more than any single prize, is what makes the Historic Adventure Quest worth the walk.