The Old Post Office, also known as the former Pekin Federal Building, is a historic building in Pekin, Illinois. Built in 1906, the building held Pekin's U.S. government offices; the first floor served as the city's main post office, while the second floor held various offices, including a Department of the Treasury office and an Army recruitment office.

Supervising Architect The Office of the Supervising Architect was an agency of the United States Treasury Department that designed federal government buildings from 1852 to 1939. The office handled some of the most important architectural commissions of the nineteenth ...

James Knox Taylor designed the building in the Renaissance Revival style, in keeping with the tradition of using classical styles for federal buildings. The building's design features a red brick exterior with a limestone base and

quoin Quoins ( or ) are masonry blocks at the corner of a wall. Some are structural, providing strength for a wall made with inferior stone or rubble, while others merely add aesthetic detail to a corner. According to one 19th century encyclopedia, t ...

fanlight A fanlight is a form of lunette window, often semicircular or semi-elliptical in shape, with glazing bars or tracery sets radiating out like an open fan. It is placed over another window or a doorway, and is sometimes hinged to a transom. Th ...

s and keystones above the first-floor windows; and a limestone

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

with a parapet wall and a cartouche above the main entrance. The Post Office moved out in 1966 and the building was sold to private owners in 1967. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 9, 1980. Eventually the building was bought by the Tazewell County government. County board meetings were held in the building for a time. Several county offices still operate in the building. The east side of the building's addition settled unevenly, developing a large crack between the addition and original structure in 2016; due to the historic static of the building, the county immediately asked for bids to shore up the east side.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places Federal buildings in the United States Government buildings completed in 1906 1900s architecture in the United States Buildings and structures in Tazewell County, Illinois County government buildings in Illinois Government buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois National Register of Historic Places in Tazewell County, Illinois Post office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Renaissance Revival architecture in Illinois Pekin, Illinois 1906 establishments in Illinois