If you live here, you've probably got around to wondering -- maybe just before you fell asleep, when the mind is loose and ranging about on its own -- where Pekin got its name.
I remember reading some absurd story about someone peeking through a window while they were trying to name the place. Don't believe it. Someone pulled that story out of his hat and, because no one had a better suggestion, it was recorded as fact.
In 1821 or whenever it was that this place was settled (can someone check that date for me?), this mountain ridge was called (surprise) Mountain Ridge. That's the kind of name they would use today, too, because it's evocative of the Great Outdoors or something. It's the kind of name they would give a housing development in the middle of a plain as flat as a table. Mountain Ridge Homes Inc.
But the name Mountain Ridge didn't stick back then. Maybe it was because the first couple of people living out there in the forest with the wolves and the bears didn't much care for evocations of the Great Outdoors. Maybe they wanted a little civilization, and -- the forest can get lonely -- they probably wanted to encourage other people to settle out there.
Like those guys pushing modern housing developments, the early Pekiners (can you say that?) knew that a name can make or break your image. For a town on the frontier, it would help determine the kind of people who would move out there and be your neighbors. It would also project an image of the kind of people who must already live there, so you wouldn't want to choose just any name. Think of these real places: Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, or Nutts, also in Arkansas. Think of Jolly Dump, which is a real place in Butte County, South Dakota. Do you think of future great statesmen living in Jolly Dump, Butte County, South Dakota? And what sort of person would be likely to move there?
So people tend to name their new places after great cities and people from their history books. New York State has, to name a few, Syracuse, Rome, Ithaca, Cairo, Jerusalem Corners, Carthage, Paris, New London, Berlin, Moscow Hill, and so on. (Porcupine Butte is in South Dakota, where there's just no telling.)
Anyway, for Mountain Ridge, someone came up with Pekin. Pekin back then was another great city and, like Western New York back then, it was pretty much at the edge of the world, at least to Americans.
Somewhere along the line we English-speakers added a g to the name of the Chinese capital and started calling it Peking, and more recently it became Beijing, but Pekin, NY, was named after the capital of China.
There are plenty other places in America named after Beijing. I've listed them below by county: