Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Pawnee, IL

Pawnee is a village in Sangamon County in central Illinois, part of the Springfield metropolitan area, and it is named after the Pawnee Tribe.

The area's first settler, Justus Henkle, arrived in March 1818, and the settlement that grew up beside a creek became known as Horse Creek.

When residents petitioned for a post office in 1854, the Post Office Department disliked the name Horse Creek and renamed the community Pawnee; the village was incorporated on November 9, 1891.

The 2020 census counted 2,678 people in Pawnee, just below its 2010 peak of 2,739, and the 2000 census counted 1,028 households in the village.

Pawnee's growth was built on coal - the village's own history says its Peabody Coal Company mine was once billed as the largest coal mine in the world, and the town even had its own railroad, the Pawnee Railroad.

On October 13, 1902, an explosion at Pawnee's Victor Mine killed six workers when a charge ignited coal dust in the shaft.

Coal mining ended in Pawnee when the mine closed in the mid-1990s, but the village held its population as a Springfield-area community.

Abraham Lincoln regularly traveled through Pawnee on the Black Diamond Road on his way to Springfield, according to local histories.

Pawnee was the adopted home of Howard B. Austin, who in 1936 became Illinois's first poet laureate.

The village's 5,000-square-foot public library was named Library of the Year for 2004 by the Rolling Prairie Library System.