Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Fults, IL

Fults is a tiny village in the Renault precinct of Monroe County, Illinois, lying entirely within the American Bottom floodplain of the Mississippi River.

The village is named for Jacob Fults, a War of 1812 veteran born in Pennsylvania in 1793 to German immigrants, who in 1829 settled the community then known as Braunsberg, which eventually took his name.

Fults was formally founded as a village on April 12, 1937, even though settlement at the site dates back to the 1820s.

With just 28 residents at the 2020 census, Fults is one of the smallest incorporated villages in Illinois; its population peaked at 120 back in 1950.

The whole village covers only about 0.07 square miles of land in the Mississippi River bottoms.

At the 2000 census, the village's 28 residents lived in just 9 households, nearly all of them married-couple families.

On the bluffs just north of Fults sits Saltpeter Cave, named for the bat guano once mined there for potassium nitrate used to make black powder at the French colonial post of Fort de Chartres; access to the cave was restricted after the Great Flood of 1993.

The bluffs above the village are also home to the Fults Hill Prairie Nature Preserve, one of the last surviving hill prairies in Illinois.

Fults uses ZIP code 62244 and sits in Monroe County, whose seat is Waterloo.