Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Silvis Silvis, IL

Silvis is a city in Rock Island County in the Quad Cities metropolitan area, sitting next to East Moline and Moline about 165 miles west of Chicago and 165 miles east of Des Moines.

Silvis was originally named Pleasant Valley and was incorporated in 1906, taking its present name from Richard Shippen Silvis, one of the original settlers whose family operated the Silvis Mining Company.

In 1902 the Rock Island Line chose Silvis for its largest railroad locomotive repair workshop, built from 1903 on a 900-acre site with a 45-stall roundhouse, a 90-foot turntable, and two large freight yards.

Mexican immigrants who came to work in the Silvis railroad shops lived in a railway housing area known as La Yarda, where refurbished boxcars that had housed a Mexican band's instruments were turned into the Lady of Guadalupe church, dedicated on Easter Sunday in 1927.

After the Rock Island Line was liquidated in 1980, the Silvis shops were sold to National Railway Equipment and then bought in late 2021 by Railroading Heritage of Midwest America to become a museum and steam locomotive refurbishment hub, receiving Union Pacific 3985, 5511, and 6936 in November 2022.

Silvis is home to TPC Deere Run, a public golf course designed by former PGA Tour professional D. A. Weibring along the Rock River that Golf Digest once ranked No. 42 among U.S. public courses.

Since 2000, TPC Deere Run has hosted the PGA Tour's John Deere Classic every July, in the week before the British Open.

Silvis's Second Street was renamed Hero Street USA in 1967 to honor the men of that two-block street who served in the military — 84 men served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and eight of them died in World War II.

Hero Street Park was built and dedicated on October 30, 1971, with a pictorial monument and biographies of the eight fallen servicemen, a grotto naming all of Silvis's war dead, a playground, and a pavilion, and the story was told in the 2015 documentary Letters Home to Hero Street.

Silvis had a population of 8,003 in the 2020 census, up 7.0% from 7,479 in 2010.