Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in St. Louis, MI

St. Louis is a city in Gratiot County whose official motto is 'Middle of the Mitten,' because it is the designated geographic center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

A sign in Clapp Park on M-46 marks that center-of-the-Lower-Peninsula point, a designation the city won after a 1950s campaign led by the Smazel family of the St. Louis Leader-Press newspaper.

The Bethany Lutheran Mission was established in 1848 to serve the Ojibwe people and still stands near the Main Street Bridge over the Pine River, five years before Joseph W. Clapp built the first settler house in 1853.

In the late 1800s St. Louis was a fashionable spa town built around magnetic mineral springs, where guests at the Park Hotel — including detective Allan Pinkerton and Civil War general 'Fighting Joe' Hooker — came to take the waters.

The 2020 census counted 7,010 residents in St. Louis but only 1,544 households, a mismatch explained by the large institutional population of the Pine River Correctional Facility inside the city; in 2010 some 3,823 residents were institutionalized.

St. Louis was the site of the former Michigan Chemical Corporation plant, later owned by Velsicol, which produced DDT and was tied to the 1970s PBB disaster in which the fire retardant was accidentally mixed into Michigan cattle feed.

The contaminated plant site on the Pine River is now a federal Superfund site, and dredging to clean the river has continued for years while the old plant grounds sit vacant.

Bradbury Robinson, who threw the first forward pass in football history while playing for Saint Louis University in 1906, later settled in St. Louis, Michigan, founded a clinic there, and served twice as the city's mayor.

Edward Hartwick, the lumberman whose name is carried by Hartwick Pines State Park, was born and raised in St. Louis.

The city sits at the crossroads of US-127 and M-46 in the middle of Michigan's farm belt, covering about 3.53 square miles along the Pine River.