Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Forrest Forrest, IL

Forrest is a village in southeastern Livingston County, Illinois, located where U.S. Route 24 and Illinois Route 47 cross.

Forrest was laid out on December 11, 1866, by Israel J. Krack, a Baltimore-born farmer, grain dealer, and notary who had arrived in Livingston County in 1854; Krack Street, which parallels the railroad, still bears the founder's name.

Krack had already been running a grain elevator on the site by 1861 or 1862, and he built the town's first house and served as its first postmaster and first railroad station agent.

The village was named for a Mr. Forrest, a business partner of C. L. Frost, an official of the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad, and the name was reportedly first spelled 'Forestville' with a single 'r'.

When Forrest was founded the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad had already been running past the site for nearly a decade, and a second railroad, the Wabash, arrived in 1880, making the village an important stop on the Chicago-to-Kansas City line.

By the early 1890s more than sixty men worked in the Wabash repair shops at Forrest, and the village served as a freight shipment point for the railroad's Chicago Division.

Forrest grew rapidly to more than 1,000 people by 1870, although a fire in the winter of 1868-69 burned much of its young business district.

Forrest had 1,041 residents at the 2020 census, down from 1,220 in 2010, and the 2000 census counted 470 households in the village.

The village's old Wabash Railroad depot survives as a historic landmark, and local students are served by Prairie Central Community Unit School District 8.