Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Waukegan, IL

Waukegan is a city on a high bluff above Lake Michigan in northeastern Illinois, about 40 miles north of Chicago, and it is the county seat of Lake County.

Waukegan is one of the oldest communities in Illinois — the site was originally a Potawatomi settlement, was visited by Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet in 1673, and became a French trading post known as Little Fort.

Waukegan became the Lake County seat in 1841, when its population was about 150, and by 1849 it had grown to about 2,500 people and was officially listed as a port.

On March 31, 1849, the Village of Little Fort changed its name to Waukegan, derived from the Potawatomi word Waukegance, meaning little fort.

Waukegan was incorporated as a town in 1849 and voters approved incorporation as a city on February 23, 1859.

As of the 2020 census, Waukegan had a population of 89,321, making it the most populous city in Lake County and the fifth-largest city on the western shore of Lake Michigan, after Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and Kenosha.

The arrival of the railroad in 1855, and later the Washburn & Moen barbed-wire manufacturer beginning in 1891, turned Waukegan into an important industrial and port city shipping farm produce via Lake Michigan to Chicago.

Waukegan is the hometown of comedian Jack Benny, who grew up there and has a middle school named after him, and of science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, who was born there in 1920.

Ray Bradbury's Waukegan childhood inspired the fictional Green Town, Illinois, in his novels Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles made him one of America's most famous writers.

Waukegan is said to be the only place where Abraham Lincoln failed to finish a speech — when he campaigned there in 1860, a fire alarm rang out and interrupted his words.