Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Ottawa, IL

Ottawa is the county seat of LaSalle County, set at the confluence of the Fox River and the Illinois River, a spot that was long one end of a portage trail between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River system.

Ottawa was laid out in 1830 and took its name from the Ottawa (Odawa) tribe — a word meaning 'to trade' — and it was chartered as a city in 1853.

Ottawa hosted the first of the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates on August 21, 1858, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas faced off in Washington Square before a crowd estimated at 10,000 to 12,000 people.

Bronze statues of Lincoln and Douglas stand today in Ottawa's Washington Park near the site of that first debate.

Ottawa is known as the scenic gateway to Starved Rock State Park, the most popular state park in Illinois with some 2 million visitors a year, and it is also minutes from Matthiessen and Buffalo Rock state parks.

For more than 100 years Ottawa has been a major silica sand and glass center; 'Ottawa sand' is so naturally uniform that it is a standard testing material in geotechnical engineering, and it was even carried aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia for experiments.

Ottawa is remembered for the 'Radium Girls' — young women employed at a local radium watch-dial painting studio in the 1920s who were poisoned by the radioactive paint they applied with their brushes.

Ottawa was the home of William D. Boyce, who founded the Boy Scouts of America in 1910; the city honors him with the Ottawa Historical and Scouting Heritage Museum.

The 2020 census counted 18,840 people in Ottawa, living in 8,204 households.

Ottawa is home to Skydive Chicago, one of the largest skydiving operations in the country.