Biohazard Cleanup Near West Beckemeyer Beckemeyer, IL

Beckemeyer is a village in Wade Township, Clinton County, about 40 miles east of downtown St. Louis.

The village began as a way station on the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad and was laid out in 1866 under the name Buxton, in honor of a railroad attorney.

A large coal seam beneath the village began to be mined in 1894, and after an election in 1905 the growing coal town was renamed Beckemeyer for the local Beckemeyer family; its first school and first bank both opened in 1906.

Nine Beckemeyer men were among the 111 miners killed in the Centralia Coal Company mine explosion of March 25, 1947, and the village's Miners Memorial Park, built in 1997, is dedicated to them.

On February 7, 1976, a train struck a truck at a Beckemeyer crossing at 56 mph, killing 12 people including 11 children — the worst accident in Clinton County history.

The Circle Smelting Corporation zinc smelter operated in Beckemeyer from 1904 to 1994, when the EPA shut it down and declared it a Superfund site; about 35,000 cubic yards of lead-contaminated material were later removed from more than 300 properties.

The 2020 census counted 923 people and 448 households in Beckemeyer, down from a peak of 1,153 residents in 1920 during the coal era.

Beckemeyer has its own elementary school in Breese District 12, and its older students attend Central Community High School in Breese, formed in 1971 by consolidating the Breese and Aviston high schools.