Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near Morehaven Roscoe, IL

Roscoe is a village in Winnebago County, Illinois, sitting along the Rock River in the Rockford metropolitan area.

The area's first white settler was Stephen Mack Jr., who arrived in the 1830s and was married to Hononegah, a respected Native American woman; his trading outpost grew into the settlement of Macktown.

Macktown, just across the river from today's Roscoe, is the only community from the 1830s in northern Illinois that still stands without later development.

Early settler William Talcott quarreled with Mack and settled on the opposite bank in what is now Roscoe; when the Macktown bridge washed away in 1851, Macktown's residents permanently moved across the river to Roscoe.

Roscoe got its first post office in 1837, with Daniel Shaw Haight as its first postmaster, and in 1847 the Roscoe Female Seminary was founded — an institution that eventually became today's Rockford University.

Despite its 1830s roots, Roscoe was not incorporated as a village until 1965, and it took its name from Roscoe Township.

Roscoe's population grew from just 1,070 people in 1970 to 6,244 by 2000 and 10,983 at the 2020 census, as it suburbanized into the Rockford area.

The 2020 census counted 4,131 households in Roscoe, more than a third of them home to children under 18.

Roscoe has no public high school within its limits: most elementary and middle schoolers attend the four Kinnikinnick District 131 schools in the village, including Roscoe Middle School, then move on to Hononegah High School in neighboring Rockton.

Race car driver Danica Patrick, the only woman ever to win an IndyCar Series race, grew up in Roscoe.