Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Sublette Sublette, IL

Sublette is a village in southern Lee County, Illinois, that began in the 1850s as a small cluster of houses called Hanno, named for Hanau, Prussia.

In 1854 the Illinois Central Railroad built a line through Hanno and constructed a depot there for passenger and freight service.

The town's name was officially changed to Sublette by an act of the Illinois legislature in 1857, and despite the spelling it has nothing to do with subletting land from the railroad — it likely comes from the French surname Soblet.

Sublette was incorporated on February 18, 1857.

By the late 1800s Sublette had homes, stores, schools, a hotel, two grain elevators, four churches, and an armory, and at the 1880 annual inspection its Lee County Guards unit was the largest infantry company in the state of Illinois.

Sublette is home to Illinois's only reproduction set of Burma Shave signs, installed in 1995 after the village won a national contest.

The 2020 census counted 380 residents in Sublette living in 198 dwellings, down from 456 people in 189 households in 2000.

Sublette covers just 0.32 square miles, all of it land.