Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Colchester, IL

Colchester is a city in McDonough County in western Illinois, named after the city of Colchester in England.

Coal was discovered near Colchester in the 1850s, and the coal seam first described here was formally given the name "Colchester Coal" — so the town's name is now attached to a coal bed mined across the region.

Recorded mining around Colchester began in 1853, coal was being shipped to Quincy by rail by 1855, and in 1866 and 1867 alone some 500,000 tons of coal were shipped from the town.

The Colchester coal seam is unusually thin — only about 1.5 to 3 feet thick — which forced inventive mining methods, including the use of dogs for haulage underground in the early 1900s.

Colchester's mines drew immigrant miners, first the descendants of Irish Protestant refugees from the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and later Irish Catholic refugees fleeing the Great Famine.

During Prohibition in the 1920s, Colchester was the base of Henry "Kelly" Wagle, a bootlegger associated with Al Capone who moved liquor between Chicago and Kansas City — a story told in historian John E. Hallwas's 1999 book The Bootlegger.

On September 11, 1921, Wagle paid members of the disgraced Chicago "Black Sox" baseball team to come play an exhibition game with the Colchester team against nearby Macomb.

Argyle Lake State Park lies about 2 miles north of Colchester.

Colchester's population peaked at 1,747 in 1970, and the 2020 census counted 1,108 people living in 534 households.

Colchester students attend schools in the West Prairie Community Unit School District 103, with the elementary and middle schools located in town.