Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Zilwaukee, MI

Zilwaukee is a small city in Saginaw County on the Saginaw River, just north of the city of Saginaw in Michigan's Great Lakes Bay region.

Zilwaukee was founded in 1848 when brothers Daniel and Solomon Johnson, from New York, built a sawmill on the river; the first permanent settlement followed around 1850.

Local legend holds that the Johnson brothers deliberately named the town Zilwaukee — originally spelled Zilwaukie — to lure German immigrant workers who thought they were signing up to work in the well-known German community of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a story retold by the Saginaw News at the town's 1954 centennial.

Zilwaukee is famous statewide as the home of the Zilwaukee Bridge, the eight-lane segmental concrete bridge that carries I-75 and US-23 across the Saginaw River.

The Zilwaukee Bridge is about 8,066 feet long with a clearance of 125 feet above the river, and at $117.5 million it was the most expensive bridge in Michigan when its northbound lanes opened in December 1987 and southbound lanes in August 1988.

Building the bridge was famously troubled: on August 28, 1982, a 300-foot section under construction tilted several feet because of the weight of construction equipment, halting work for nearly three years.

The current bridge replaced a four-lane bascule drawbridge built in 1960 whose openings had caused notorious traffic backups on I-75.

The 2020 census counted 1,534 people in Zilwaukee, down from its peak of 2,201 in 1980; at the 2010 census its 1,658 residents lived in 671 households.

Zilwaukee Township was organized on January 20, 1854, and the city was later carved out of the township; the community's municipal water system dates to 1941.