Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Shadow Lakes Braidwood, IL

Braidwood is a city in Will County, Illinois, about 53 miles southwest of Chicago and 18 miles south of Joliet, with a population of 6,194 at the 2020 census.

Braidwood sprang up almost overnight after coal was discovered beneath the prairie in the mid-1860s; the boomtown's post office opened in 1867 and the settlement was first called Keeversville.

The city was incorporated on March 4, 1873, and named for James Braidwood, who was hired in 1872 to superintend the sinking of the area's first deep mine shaft.

At its coal-boom peak Braidwood may have held around 8,000 people, making it the second-largest city in Will County at the time; the 1880 census recorded 5,524 residents, still the highest figure in its census history books until modern times.

Braidwood was rocked in 1877 by one of the area's worst coal strikes, after which mine owners imported strikebreakers and hundreds of miners left town.

The strip mines around Braidwood exposed the world-famous Mazon Creek fossil beds, where amateur collector Francis Tully in the late 1950s found the strange fossil that became Tullimonstrum gregarium, the 'Tully Monster' and the official state fossil of Illinois, a creature found nowhere else on Earth.

Fossil hunting is still allowed by permit at the Mazonia-Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area, a 2,640-acre site with more than 200 water-filled former strip-mine pits popular for fishing and waterfowl hunting.

Braidwood Lake, a 2,308-acre cooling lake built in the late 1970s, supplies the Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station just outside town and doubles as a fishing lake and waterfowl refuge.

Anton Cermak, the Bohemian immigrant who later became mayor of Chicago, once worked as a miner in Braidwood.

A scene in the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles was filmed at the Braidwood Inn, now the Sun Motel, even though the scene was set in Wichita.