Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Kinderhook, IL

Kinderhook is a village in Pike County, Illinois, lying along the Great River Road in the Mississippi River bottomlands of northwestern Pike County.

Kinderhook was founded in 1836 by Chester Churchill and Bridge Whitten, natives of New York who named it after Kinderhook, New York; the name itself is a Dutch term meaning "children's corner."

The young village grew along and below a short bluff dotted with American Indian mounds, quickly gaining several stores, a blacksmith, a flour mill, a post office, and Baptist and Methodist Episcopal churches.

Kinderhook is famous for the Kinderhook plates, six small bell-shaped brass plates with strange engravings that were supposedly dug out of an Indian mound near the village in 1843.

The plates were actually a hoax, forged by Bridge Whitten, Robert Wiley, and Wilburn Fugate to test the Latter-day Saint prophet Joseph Smith, whose church was then headquartered at nearby Nauvoo; Fugate admitted the forgery in 1879.

In 1980, Northwestern University tests on a surviving Kinderhook plate confirmed it was made in the 19th century, settling the question of the hoax.

Kinderhook was incorporated as a village on February 14, 1896.

Kinderhook's population peaked at 394 residents in 1880; the 2020 census counted 189 people, and in 2000 the village had 249 people living in 101 households.

In 1993, Kinderhook's post office was chosen as one of the twelve most unique post offices in the United States.

The Kinderhook Historical Society maintains a small museum in a building across the street from the village post office.