The Feb. 2005 issue of the Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society’s Monthly, pages 968-972, features the story of Marshall’s Landing on Spring Lake and the Radville horse race track, old-time popular attractions in Tazewell County that were developed by notable Pekin businessman Horace S. Marshall (1848-1893).
Marshall also built the Marshall Block at 342 Elizabeth St., Pekin, in 1889, a building that still stands today as the home of the Kuhfuss & Proehl law offices across the street from the Tazewell County Courthouse and the McKenzie Building. When Marshall’s investments failed in the early 1890s and he faced inescapable financial ruin, it was in the cellar of his own Marshall Block that Marshall committed suicide by taking strychnine on 16 Dec. 1893.
Horace Marshall’s sad and shocking death was reported in the Bloomington Pantagraph on 22 Dec. 1893. The first paragraph of the article says:
“The colored janitor of the Marshall building, which is south of the court house, on going to the cellar of that building at 7:30 this morning, found the cellar door locked from the inside. Looking through the glass window the form of a man with this toes up and boots on were seen by Roach, the janitor. Turning white with fright he rushed after the policeman and found Officer Hennig, who broke in the cellar door and found Horace S. Marshall lying on a bed of excelsior placed there by himself, cold in death.”
The journalist who wrote this article fails to provide us the full name of “Roach, the janitor,” but noted that he was the “colored” janitor of the Marshall Building, adding a racial joke about the janitor “turning white with fright.” The article tells us nothing else about the janitor who happened upon Marshall’s body, though the Tazewell County Coroner would have summoned him to testify at the inquest into the cause and manner of Marshall’s death.
We are able to learn a little more about “Roach the janitor” from the Pekin city directories and the U.S. Census record from that period of time. In fact, here at “From the History Room” we have mentioned Roach twice before. His full name was Joseph Roach, and he appears in Pekin records from 1887 to 1911.
The 1887 Pekin city directory first lists him working as a driver for George W. Rankin. Curiously, Joseph Roach is not listed in the 1893 city directory even though the Pantagraph article shows that by then he was working as the Marshall Building’s janitor. The 1895 directory, however, does so list him, and also tells us that Roach lived in an apartment in the building where he worked.
In the 1898 and 1900-1902 Pekin city directories, we find that Joseph roach was still the Marshall Block’s janitor, but the directory does not say he then resided in the building. That matches what we find in the 1900 U.S. Census, which shows Joseph Roach, 48, born April 1852 in Alabama, black, an unmarried janitor boarding with the (white) Robert Gorsuch family at 1117 Seventh St.
By the time of the 1903 directory, though, Roach was again rooming in the Marshall Block, where he was still the building’s janitor. The 1905 directory lists him as “Roach, Joe (colored), janitor in Marshall block,” but does not say he then lived there. However, in the 1908 directory Roach is again listed as residing in the building where he worked as a janitor.
In the following year, we see from the 1909 city directory that Roach was no longer the Marshall Building janitor, but instead had moved next door to John St. Cerny’s Tazewell Hotel, where Roach was employed as a janitor. But we also know from the 1910 U.S. Census that Roach also worked as a porter at the Tazewell Hotel, because that census shows Joseph Roach, 60, said to be Tennessee-born rather than born in Alabama, working as a Tazewell Hotel porter, and in fact listed as a member of the John St. Cerny household (that is, he was living in the hotel along with the St. Cernys).
Besides Roach, the 1910 census lists two other African-American employees at the Tazewell Hotel at that time: a porter named William Edward “Rastus” Gaines, 33, formerly of Georgia, and Gaines’ roommate Edward Reaves, 49, formerly of Kentucky, the hotel’s head chef, both of whom lived in the hotel. Roach, Gaines, and Reaves were all bachelors who had come to Pekin in the latter 1800s, and were not related to any of Pekin’s older pioneer black families such as the Costleys, Ashbys, Shipmans, and Winslows, who frequently appear in Pekin records prior and immediately after the Civil War.
Joseph Roach last appears in Pekin records in the 1911 city directory, which shows “Roach Joseph, colored, janitor Illinois Hotel, r same.” From this, we learn that Joe Roach had moved from his janitor/porter job at the Tazewell Hotel on Elizabeth Street to a job as janitor of the Illinois Hotel at the corner of Second and St. Mary streets.
Roach disappears from the record after 1911. Susan Rynerson of the Tazewell County Genealogical & Historical Society says there is no Tazewell County death certificate for him, nor has she been able to find a death record for him elsewhere.
