Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Lombard, IL

Lombard is a village in DuPage County, Illinois, a suburb about 20 miles west of Chicago, with a population of 44,476 at the 2020 census.

Lombard was originally called Babcock's Grove, after brothers Ralph and Morgan Babcock, who settled in a grove along the DuPage River in the 1830s; it was renamed in 1868 for Chicago banker and developer Josiah Lombard, who platted the settlement.

Lombard was incorporated in 1869, the year after it took its new name.

Census Bureau data count about 17,300 households in Lombard, averaging about 2.5 people each, with roughly 71% of homes owner-occupied.

Lombard is nicknamed 'The Lilac Village' because of Colonel William Plum, a Civil War veteran who collected lilac varieties from around the world on his travels; when he died in 1927 he bequeathed his estate to the village, and its garden of 200 lilac varieties became Lilacia Park.

Lombard celebrates its lilacs every May with the Lilac Time festival and the Lombard Lilac Parade, and Lilacia Park has grown to about 10 acres with some 1,500 lilac bushes.

Plum's former home served for decades as the Helen M. Plum Memorial Library, named for his wife, before the library moved to a new building in 2023.

The Sheldon Peck Homestead, built by settlers who arrived in 1837, was the area's first school and is a documented Underground Railroad site on the National Park Service's Network to Freedom; it is now restored by the Lombard Historical Society.

In 1891, Lombard's Ellen Martin became the first woman to vote in Illinois, exploiting a loophole in the village charter decades before the 19th Amendment.

Harold Gray, creator of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, drew the strip while living in a house on North Main Street in Lombard.