Raw States

Pekin Marigold Festival

Pekin, IL · Festival

When

September 12–13, 2026

Where

Mineral Springs Park · Pekin · IL

Cost

Not confirmed

Status

Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule

Pekin has called itself the Marigold Capital of the World since the 1970s, after Senator Everett Dirksen's unsuccessful campaign to make the marigold the national flower. Mineral Springs Park hosts the resulting festival each September, with a parade, carnival, and juried Art in the Park show. The Pekin Area Chamber of Commerce has run it for more than fifty years.

The history within reach

• Pekin Marigold Festivalsame spot

  Pekin has called itself the Marigold Capital of the World since the 1970s, after Senator Everett Dirksen's unsuccessful campaign to make the marigold the national flower.

• Will it play in Peoria?9.2 mi

  A vaudeville town of the right size in the right place, so booking agents used it to find out whether an act worked on ordinary audiences before spending money on the cities.

• Peoria, whiskey capital of the world9.2 mi

  Corn, coal, river and rail in one place made this the largest distilling town on earth, and for years Peoria County paid more federal liquor tax than any other district in the country.

• Caterpillar and the crawler tractor9.3 mi

  Two California firms merged and moved the works to the Illinois River, where the track-laying tractor became the machine that built the interstates, the Alaska Highway and most of the airfields of the Second World War.

• Richard Pryor9.3 mi

  Born in Peoria and raised in his grandmother's brothel, where his mother worked, a childhood he later put on stage without softening any of it.