24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Sesser, IL

Sesser is a city in Franklin County, in the coal country of southern Illinois.

Sesser did not exist before 1904: the site was open prairie covered with wheat and corn fields until coal specialists surveyed the area that summer and discovered a very high grade of coal.

Sesser was named for John Sesser, a railroad surveyor who, together with John C. Elliot, laid out the town's original sixteen-block plat as the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad extended its line south from Centralia, with rails laid in January 1906.

Sesser's first mine, the Keller Mine, was sunk in 1905-1906, and the town was incorporated as a village in 1906 and re-incorporated as a city in 1909.

Coal sent Sesser's population soaring to 2,841 by 1920; at the 2020 census the city had 1,888 residents living in 845 households.

Old Ben Coal Company's No. 16 mine at Sesser operated from 1905 to 1923, and its later No. 21 mine, opened in 1952 and idled in 1991, left mine-subsidence concerns for some Sesser homeowners in the 1980s.

The Sesser Opera House, built in 1914, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Sesser covers just about one square mile - 1.03 square miles in total.

Sesser's students attend Sesser-Valier Community Unit School District 196, and Sesser-Valier High School on State Highway 154 enrolls roughly 175 students.

Sesser's boom mirrored Franklin County's: between 1910 and 1920 the county's population more than doubled, from about 26,000 to about 57,000, driven largely by immigrant coal miners.