Biohazard Cleanup Near North McLean McLean, IL

McLean is a village in southwestern McLean County that was laid out on June 22, 1855, by Franklin Price, a Bloomington real estate developer who was elected mayor of Bloomington the same year but never actually lived in the town he founded.

McLean was created by the railroad - it was platted as the Alton and Springfield Railroad, soon to become the Alton Railroad, was first built through McLean County, at the same time as the nearby railroad towns of Atlanta, Normal, and Towanda.

The village takes its name from McLean County, which honors John McLean, a pioneer Illinois lawyer and judge who became the state's first representative in Congress and later a United States senator.

McLean was incorporated as a village on May 29, 1866, and by 1900 it had grown to a population of 532.

The land under McLean was first claimed by the Mount Hope Colony, a Rhode Island emigration society that platted a town called Mt. Hope two miles east in 1836; the colony failed with only three settlers actually arriving, but its church building was moved into McLean when the new town was founded.

Remarkably, the design of the original 1855 town of McLean remains almost unaltered to this day.

McLean's railroad depot, built in 1853, is the oldest building in town and is a rare surviving wooden depot.

McLean is famous on historic Route 66 as the home of the Dixie Truckers Home, opened in 1928 by J.P. Walters and his son-in-law John Geske as a lunch counter with six stools in the corner of a mechanic's garage, and billed as Illinois' oldest truck stop - possibly the oldest in America.

The Dixie stayed open 24 hours a day from 1928 onward, closing only for a single day after a fire in 1965, and it housed the Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame from 1990 until the museum moved to Pontiac in 2003; it operates today as the Dixie Travel Plaza on Interstate 55.

McLean counted 808 residents living in 314 households at the 2000 census, and its population was still about 740 at the 2020 census.