Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Nokomis, IL

Nokomis is a city in eastern Montgomery County in central Illinois, along Illinois Route 16 between Hillsboro, the county seat, and Pana.

The town of Nokomis was settled about 1855 and laid out by T. C. Huggins of Bunker Hill and Captain Simeon Ryder of Alton; it was incorporated as a village on March 9, 1867.

Nokomis boomed on coal: the first mine in the area opened in 1897, and Peabody Coal's No. 10 mine at Nokomis employed 683 men and hoisted more than 644,000 tons of coal in a single year in the late 1910s.

Coal drove Nokomis's population up 85 percent in a single decade, to a peak of 3,465 people in the 1920 census.

Mining around Nokomis ended in 1952, when the Nokomis Coal Company's Reliance Mine, the last mine in the area, closed.

Nokomis had 2,142 residents at the 2020 census, living in 898 households — a long, slow decline from its coal-era peak.

Two Baseball Hall of Famers, first baseman Jim Bottomley and pitcher Red Ruffing, are honored along with catcher Ray Schalk at Nokomis's Bottomley-Ruffing-Schalk Museum, a museum dedicated to St. Louis Cardinals baseball and the three men's careers.

A third Nokomis ballplayer reached the majors a century later: pitcher Reid Detmers of the Los Angeles Angels is a Nokomis native.

Nokomis maintains three public parks: Nokomis Community Memorial Park, Fred B. Johnson Nokomis City Park, and Shane P. Cole Memorial Park.

Nokomis's newspaper, the Free Press-Progress, has been published since 1918.