Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Sauget Sauget, IL

Sauget is a small industrial village in St. Clair County, pronounced 'saw-ZHAY,' located in the American Bottom floodplain of the Mississippi River directly across from St. Louis, Missouri.

Sauget was incorporated in 1926 under the name 'Monsanto,' created to give the Monsanto chemical company's plants a lighter regulatory environment and low taxes, and it was later renamed for Leo Sauget, its first village president.

Despite having only 141 residents at the 2020 census, Sauget maintains its own 16-member fire department and 16-member police department — roughly one officer and firefighter for every 15 residents.

The village operates the American Bottoms Treatment Plant, a large sewage treatment plant serving much of the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Sauget also runs a municipal physical and chemical industrial wastewater treatment plant, cited as one of only three municipal treatment plants of its type in the United States.

The Monsanto plant in Sauget was the nation's largest producer of PCBs before they were banned in 1977, and the EPA has designated the plant site along Dead Creek as a Superfund site.

Sauget is home to the Gateway Grizzlies, a minor league baseball team in the Frontier League controlled by the Sauget family.

The village hosts the National Building Arts Center, a preservation and salvage organization holding one of the largest collections of significant architectural and industrial elements in the United States.

Sauget covers about 4.94 square miles in total, most of it industrial land, and its population has fallen from 359 in 1940 to 141 in 2020.

At the 2000 census Sauget had 249 people in 101 households, and village students are served by Cahokia Community Unit School District 187.