Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Roxana Roxana, IL

Roxana is a village in western Madison County in the River Bend portion of the St. Louis Metro East, bordered by Wood River, Hartford, and South Roxana.

Roxana exists because of oil: in 1918 Shell Oil Company opened its Wood River Refinery in an area called Wood River Field, houses for workers grew up around it, and the community incorporated as the village of Roxana on April 7, 1921.

The origin of the name Roxana is unknown — local lore says it honored a "Queen Roxanne" of the Netherlands in tribute to Royal Dutch Shell, even though the Netherlands never had a Queen Roxanne, and Royal Dutch Shell had founded the Roxana Petroleum Company in Oklahoma in 1912.

A majority of the land in Roxana is taken up by the Wood River Refinery, now operated by Phillips 66 as the largest refinery in its system: it grew from 336 acres to about 2,200 acres and, as of 2016, could refine 314,000 barrels of oil per day into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, asphalt, and propane for the St. Louis, Chicago, Indiana, and Ohio regions.

Roxana's Village Hall was built in 1938 on $36,000 in bonds and still houses the village offices, fire and police departments, board room, and a municipal gymnasium.

The Art Deco Roxana Theatre, built in the early 1940s with about 580 seats for vaudeville and movies, lost its roof to a tornado in 1949, closed for good in February 2002, and is now operated by the Roxana Church of the Nazarene as the Nazarene Community Center.

Roxana Park grew from a 1934 Recreation Board and land bought in 1947: the Park District was incorporated in 1952, a public swimming pool was added in 1957 and the Rox-Arena in 1969, and the main park now has four baseball diamonds, while Burbank Park, bought in 1993, hosts the annual Roxana Homecoming Festival each May.

Roxana had a population of 1,454 in the 2020 census, down from a peak of 2,090 in 1960, a small residential population for a village of 7.22 square miles because so much of its land is refinery.

The 2020 census counted 617 households and 668 housing units in Roxana, with a median age of 39.0 years and 23.3% of residents under the age of 18.

Roxana High School is located in the village, along with Central Elementary School, while South Roxana Elementary is in neighboring South Roxana and the former Burbank Elementary closed in 1984 and was demolished in 2009; nearby colleges include Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Principia College, Lewis and Clark Community College, and the SIU School of Dental Medicine in Alton.