Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Morris Morris, IL

Morris is the county seat and largest city of Grundy County, Illinois, located on the Illinois River about 60 miles southwest of Chicago.

Morris was first settled in 1834 and platted in 1842, a year after Grundy County was carved out of LaSalle County in 1841 and named for Tennessee senator and U.S. Attorney General Felix Grundy; the city itself was named for Isaac Morris, who helped secure it the county seat.

Morris grew up on the Illinois River, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, becoming an extensive grain market and a center for the surrounding bituminous coal region.

The 2020 census counted 14,163 people in Morris, and Census Bureau survey estimates put the city at about 6,484 households.

Downtown Morris is anchored by the Grundy County Courthouse, an iconic structure dating to 1910.

Morris hosts the Grundy County Corn Festival, a five-day fall harvest celebration founded in 1949 that features one of Illinois' largest parades and takes over the downtown each September.

Morris was the first Illinois community struck during the April 3, 1974 Super Outbreak of tornadoes, though the tornado caused only minor damage in the city and no injuries.

In the early 1960s, the world's first electronic telephone switching system was installed at the Morris central office, a milestone in Bell System history that grew out of the largest sustained research and development program toward a single goal in the Bell System.

Morris was the thinly disguised "Jonesville" studied in depth by a team of ten University of Chicago anthropologists and sociologists, whose findings were published as W. Lloyd Warner's Democracy in Jonesville in 1949.

Morris Community High School's Redskins football program has won three Illinois state championships.