Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Peabody, KS

Peabody is a city in Marion County in the Flint Hills of central Kansas, located on U.S. Route 50 between Newton and Florence along Doyle Creek.

Peabody began as two rival towns — Coneburg, laid out by a Wisconsin colony in 1870 and named for town company president John Cone, and Peabody, platted just south of it in 1871 — and the bitter rivals finally merged into one city in 1879; the street along their disputed border is still called Division Avenue.

The town was named after F.H. Peabody of Boston, a former vice-president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, whose main line reached the town in 1871.

When F.H. Peabody visited in May 1874 he offered to fund a library, and the building that opened in June 1875 became the first free tax-supported public library in Kansas; it was replaced by a Carnegie library in 1914, and the little original building now serves as the Peabody Historical Library Museum.

Peabody's entire 1880s downtown is a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places with 42 contributing buildings — Peabody was only the second community in Kansas to get its whole downtown listed — and the city holds six National Register listings in all, including Peabody City Park.

Peabody is famous across the region for its Independence Day celebration, held since the 19th century in Peabody City Park; its fireworks finale, called the 'Battle of New Orleans,' sets off more than a million individual pyrotechnic items, and in the 1960s and 1970s the celebration drew crowds of 30,000 or more.

The 2020 census counted 937 people in Peabody living in 397 households — a steep 22.6 percent drop from 2010 and a shadow of its 1920 peak of 2,455 people, when a local oil boom briefly swelled the town.

In 1885 the Kansas State Fair itself was held at Peabody, where fairgoers built a 40-foot monument to the recently deceased President Ulysses S. Grant out of forty bushels of ears of corn.

Around 1900 Peabody was a nationally known harness-racing center: local stallion Joe Patchen sired Dan Patch, the most famous pacer of his era, who sold for 60,000 dollars in 1907.

During World War II, Peabody hosted a branch prisoner-of-war camp in the Eyestone Building on West 2nd Street, where up to 150 German and Italian prisoners were quartered and sent out to work on area farms; the camp closed in December 1945.