24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Maeystown, IL

Maeystown is a tiny village in Monroe County that was founded in 1852 by Jacob Maeys, a Bavarian immigrant who had bought the tract known as McRoberts' Meadow in 1848 because the waterpower from its large spring could run a sawmill.

Maeystown was settled almost entirely by German immigrants of the Forty-Eighter movement, who left Germany after the failed revolutions of 1848, and the village remained exclusively German for decades.

Maeystown was so thoroughly German that German was the language spoken on the street and used in church services until 1943.

The village was laid out in 1856 under the name Maeysville, and it became Maeystown in 1860 when a post office opened with Jacob Maeys himself as the first postmaster.

Nearly the entire village is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Maeystown Historic District, a distinction only a handful of American communities hold, with about 60 significant stone and limestone buildings surviving from the 1850s to about 1910.

Maeystown's German craftsmen built its houses of limestone along the bluffs in a style reminiscent of Bavarian stone houses, and landmarks include Maeys' log house, the original church, and the old mill, which now houses a local history museum.

Maeystown is said to have the longest stretch of stone gutter in the United States, running about 400 feet.

Maeystown celebrates its German heritage each year with the pre-Lenten Fastnacht and a fall Oktoberfest, and the village has had its own periodic German-flavored newspaper, the Maeystown Volksblatt.

Maeystown had just 150 residents at the 2020 census, down from a peak of 284 back in 1910, and the whole village covers only about 0.30 square miles in the valley of Maeystown Creek.

Maeystown sits about 9 miles southwest of Waterloo, the Monroe County seat, in the Metro-East region across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.