Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Hunters Ridge Clinton, IL

Clinton is the largest city in and the county seat of DeWitt County, Illinois, in the heart of central Illinois.

The city was founded in 1835 by land speculator Jesse W. Fell and legislator James Allen, who stopped to rest their horses on the open prairie midway between Decatur and Bloomington and decided the spot was ideal for a town.

Both the city and DeWitt County are named for DeWitt Clinton, who served as governor of New York from 1817 to 1823.

Clinton's population was 7,004 at the 2020 census, living in 3,074 households — down slightly from a modern peak of 8,014 back in 1980.

Abraham Lincoln practiced law in Clinton for some twenty years while riding the 8th Judicial Circuit with Judge David Davis, and one of the town's landmarks today is Mr. Lincoln's Square.

Clinton tradition holds that Lincoln delivered his famous line 'You can fool all of the people some of the time...' in an 1858 speech in Clinton, an attribution repeated by biographer Carl Sandburg — though historians still debate whether Lincoln ever said it at all.

Six miles east of Clinton sits the Clinton Power Station (Clinton Clean Energy Center), a single-unit nuclear plant that began commercial operation on November 24, 1987, and generates enough electricity for roughly a million homes.

Clinton Lake, a 4,900-acre reservoir opened in 1978, was built in the 1970s to cool the nuclear plant and is now the centerpiece of the 9,300-acre Clinton Lake State Recreation Area, popular for boating, fishing, and sailing.

In December 2025 the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission renewed the Clinton plant's operating license, clearing it to keep running until 2047 under a 20-year power agreement with Meta.

Clinton's annual Apple 'n Pork Festival, held each fall, draws crowds ten times the city's population or more.