Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Nauvoo, IL

Nauvoo is a small city on a wide bend of the Mississippi River in Hancock County, Illinois, and its name comes from a Hebrew word meaning 'beautiful'.

The site was first settled in 1824, was known successively as Quashquame and Venus, and was renamed Commerce in 1834 before the Latter-day Saints arrived.

In 1839 Joseph Smith purchased the townsite for Latter-day Saints fleeing persecution in Missouri, and on April 21, 1840, Commerce was renamed Nauvoo.

Nauvoo grew explosively and by 1844 had swollen to about 12,000 residents, rivaling Chicago as one of the largest cities in Illinois.

Joseph Smith served as Nauvoo's mayor from 1842 until 1844, when he and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob at the jail in nearby Carthage.

The Saints completed the original Nauvoo Temple in 1846 just as most of them departed west for Utah under Brigham Young, and the abandoned temple was burned by arsonists in 1848.

From 1849 to 1856 Nauvoo hosted a utopian socialist colony of French Icarians under Etienne Cabet, which reached nearly 500 members at its peak.

After the Icarians left, Nauvoo became the largest German-speaking community in Illinois and remained so for about fifty years, with a thriving wine-making and fruit-growing trade.

Baxter's Vineyards, founded in Nauvoo in 1857 by Emile Baxter, is Illinois' oldest established winery.

The Nauvoo Blue Cheese company aged cheese in the area's cool former wine cellars from the 1930s until the business was sold and relocated in 2003.