Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Benld Benld, IL

Benld is a city in southeastern Macoupin County, in the Metro East region northeast of St. Louis.

Benld was established in 1903 as a coal-mining town, and its strange name is a mash-up of founder Benjamin L. Dorsey's name — 'Ben' plus his initials 'L' and 'D' — since Dorsey secured the land and coal rights the town was built on.

Reader's Digest once declared Benld (pronounced bə-NELD) the most difficult place name to pronounce in the entire state of Illinois.

On September 29, 1938, a meteorite fell on Benld — only the third meteorite recorded in Illinois — punching through the roof of Edward McCain's garage and embedding itself in the seat of his 1928 Pontiac Coupe.

The Benld meteorite and pieces of McCain's car are now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, one of the few known cases of a meteorite striking a man-made object.

Benld's immigrant miners, many of them Carpatho-Rusyn, built St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church (Holy Dormition) in 1901; it served the mining community for over a century before being converted to a monastery in 2010.

In March 2009, the seven-year-old Benld Elementary School was so badly damaged by mine subsidence from the abandoned coal workings beneath the town that it had to be condemned and demolished.

In 2017 the school district won a $4 million settlement from Union Pacific Railroad, as successor to the Superior Coal Company, over the subsidence damage.

Benld's grand Coliseum Ballroom, a beloved dance hall that anchored the town's social life for decades, was destroyed by fire in 2011.

Benld had a population of 1,464 at the 2020 census, down from 1,556 in 2010, and the 2000 census counted 676 households in the city.