Biohazard Cleanup Near West Aledo Aledo, IL

Aledo is the county seat and largest city of Mercer County in western Illinois, founded by John S. Thompson and established in 1855 as the railroad was extended to the area.

The town was briefly named DeSoto, after explorer Hernando de Soto, but had to change it when it was discovered that another Illinois village in Jackson County already had the same name.

Aledo won the Mercer County seat in 1857, when voters approved moving it from Millersburg in a countywide referendum, and the city was incorporated on August 15, 1863.

A post office has operated in Aledo since September 24, 1856, making it one of the community's oldest continuous institutions.

In the 1950s, the first Tastee-Freez soft-serve ice cream shop in the United States was built in downtown Aledo.

The Downtown Aledo Historic District was established in 2016 and protects 75 contributing historic buildings, with Aledo's oldest surviving structures dating to the 1860s.

The 2020 census counted 3,633 people in Aledo, and the city covers about 2.36 square miles.

Mercer County, organized in 1825, is named for Hugh Mercer, a Scottish-American physician and Revolutionary War general killed at the Battle of Princeton, and Aledo is part of the Davenport-Moline-Rock Island metropolitan area despite its rural character.

The Mercer County Courthouse anchors Aledo's downtown, which the city promotes as a preserved 19th-century county-seat center.

Aledo has stayed remarkably stable in size for decades - its population has hovered between about 3,600 and 3,700 in every census from 2000 through 2020.