Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Royalton, IL

Royalton is a village in southwestern Franklin County, Illinois, in the heart of the southern Illinois coal fields, with Illinois Route 149 passing through it.

An old diagonal road, the Lusk's Ferry Road from Fort Kaskaskia to Lusk's Ferry on the Ohio River, crossed what is now Royalton in the early 19th century.

Isaac Snider built a store here in the spring of 1856 and opened a post office named Osage for the Osage trees nearby; in November 1857 he platted a first village of 38 lots.

The modern town dates to the coal mines: John W. Royal's farm village was surveyed in 1905 and took the name Royalton, and the village was incorporated in 1908.

The North No. 1 mine opened in 1907, and at their peak the Royalton mines employed more than 600 miners, many of them European immigrants who first lived in box cars along North Main Street.

During the mining boom Royalton's population swelled to an estimated 3,800 people at its peak, though its highest census count was 2,108 in 1930.

On October 27, 1914, an explosion in the North No. 1 Mine killed 52 miners - the worst mine disaster in the southern Illinois coal fields up to that time - and a second explosion on September 28, 1918, killed 21 more men.

Royalton's Protection of the Holy Virgin Mary Orthodox Church, opened in late 1914 by Eastern European immigrant miners, is the only remaining Russian Orthodox church in southern Illinois, and it keeps a memorial to the 1914 disaster victims, many of whom are buried in its cemetery.

The North No. 1 mine operated until September 1951, and the 2020 census counted 1,068 residents in Royalton, living in 473 households.

Royalton covers about 1.12 square miles in Six Mile Township.