Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Zeigler, IL

Zeigler is a city in southwestern Franklin County, Illinois, that began as a purpose-built coal company town.

Chicago industrialist Levi Zeigler Leiter and his son Joseph bought about 8,000 acres of Franklin County land, and Joseph's Zeigler Coal Company hoisted its first coal on June 8, 1904.

Zeigler was named for Levi Zeigler Leiter, and the town incorporated as a city in 1914.

Zeigler is laid out in the shape of a wagon wheel: streets radiate outward from a circular park at the center, around which the post office, library, and shops are concentrated.

According to local histories, Joseph Leiter mixed champagne instead of water into the cornerstone concrete of his model mine and engraved the cornerstone with the date 2004, boasting the mine was a hundred years ahead of its time.

In 1905, an explosion at the Zeigler No. 1 mine killed about fifty men, one of the worst coal disasters in Franklin County history.

By 1908, Zeigler No. 1 was the third-largest producing coal mine in the nation, and a local census in 1925-26 counted 5,188 residents in the booming town.

The 2020 census counted 1,484 people in Zeigler, in 662 households, a fraction of its coal-boom peak.

A statue of a coal miner stands in the center of Zeigler today, honoring the industry that created the town.

Illinois Route 149 runs through the center of Zeigler, leading east to West Frankfort, while Route 148 skirts its western edge north to neighboring Christopher.