Biohazard Cleanup Near Sunset Ridge Zion, IL

Zion is a city in Lake County, Illinois, along Lake Michigan near the Wisconsin border, about 40 miles north of Chicago.

Zion was founded in July 1901 by John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish-born evangelist and faith healer who had established the Christian Catholic Church in Chicago in 1896, and the city was named after Mount Zion in Israel.

Dowie purchased 6,500 acres of land in Lake County in 1899 and publicly announced the purchase in 1901, and Zion is one of only a few cities in the world to have been completely planned out before it was built.

From its origins Zion was theocratically governed, with Dowie's church controlling all business activities; the massive 8,000-seat Shiloh Tabernacle, completed in 1900, was the city's religious center until it burned in 1937.

Dowie ruled Zion as a theocracy forbidding physicians' offices, dance halls, theatres, drugstores, and smoking and drinking, until opposition to his fiscal irresponsibility led to his removal in 1906 and replacement by Wilbur Voliva.

The City of Zion was incorporated in 1902 and officially changed its name from Zion City to Zion in 1919.

The population of Zion was 24,655 at the 2020 census, up from 24,413 in 2010 and 22,866 in 2000.

Zion has about 8,813 households according to Census QuickFacts for 2020-2024, with an average of about 2.74 persons per household.

Zion covers about 9.81 square miles, almost entirely land, on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Zion sits beside Adeline Jay Geo-Karis Illinois Beach State Park, a 4,160-acre park established in 1948 with over six miles of Lake Michigan shoreline that preserves the only remaining beach-ridge shoreline in Illinois and was designated a U.S. National Natural Landmark in 1980.