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Herrin is a city in Williamson County in southern Illinois, with a population of 12,352 at the 2020 census, and it forms the Marion-Herrin Micropolitan Area.

The first permanent settler, Baptist preacher Isaac Herring, entered the first land in what became Herrin on November 4, 1816 - two years before Illinois statehood - paying $2 an acre for 160 acres on what was called Herring's Prairie.

The prairie's name shortened to Herrin's Prairie after Isaac Herring's son-in-law David Herrin arrived, and a post office opened there on May 26, 1864.

In 1892 prospectors including David Ruffin Harrison and Ephraim Snyder Herrin found a rich coal vein 185 feet underground, launching the mining boom that built the town.

Herrin was platted on December 4, 1896, incorporated as a village on March 21, 1898, and incorporated as a city on April 17, 1900.

Coal turned Herrin into a boomtown almost overnight: its population jumped from 1,559 in 1900 to 6,861 in 1910 and 10,986 by 1920.

Herrin was the site of the 1922 Herrin Massacre, one of the deadliest labor conflicts in American history, in which 23 miners and mine guards were killed during a national coal strike; no one was ever convicted.

In its prosperous mining days Herrin had White City Park, an amusement park with a salt-water swimming pool, rides, and a theater, which opened on Memorial Day 1924 before 5,000 attendees.

President Harry S. Truman visited Herrin in September 1948, a sign of the coal town's political clout in southern Illinois.

Herrin has about 5,559 households averaging about 2.16 people, and about 65.7% of its homes are owner-occupied.