Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Old Shawneetown, IL

Old Shawneetown is a village in Shawnee Township, Gallatin County, on the northwest bank of the Ohio River in far southeastern Illinois, along Illinois Route 13.

Old Shawneetown is billed as the oldest town in Illinois — the county historical society dates early settlement to about 1793, and the United States government surveyed and platted the town in 1810.

Old Shawneetown and Washington, D.C., share the distinction of being the only towns in America chartered by the United States government.

Shawneetown served as a key United States government administrative center for the Northwest Territory, and a federal land office was established there in 1812, before Illinois was even a state.

Lewis and Clark are believed to have stopped at Shawneetown in early November 1803 on their way down the Ohio River to Fort Massac.

Old Shawneetown is the site of the first bank chartered in Illinois, in 1816; it began in a log cabin and moved in 1822 into a brick building — only the second brick structure in town — now known as the John Marshall House.

Local legend holds that the Shawneetown bank once refused to buy the first bonds issued by the young city of Chicago, doubting that any city located so far from a navigable river could survive.

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Shawneetown on May 8, 1825, during his farewell tour of America, a visit long remembered as a high point in the town's early social history.

The town's second great bank building, the five-columned Greek Revival Bank of Illinois constructed in 1839–41, still stands and is preserved as the Shawneetown Bank State Historic Site.

Shawneetown was a major river port in its prime — the census counted 1,900 residents in 1840 — but repeated Ohio River flooding culminated in the Great Flood of 1937, which devastated the village.