24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Herculaneum, MO

Herculaneum is a city in Jefferson County on the Mississippi River, laid out in 1808 by Moses Austin and Samuel Hammond as a shipping point for Austin's lead mines near Potosi.

Moses Austin named the town for the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, saying the eroded limestone ledges above the river resembled the seats of a Roman amphitheatre.

By 1813, three shot towers stood on Herculaneum's bluffs, dropping molten lead through copper sieves to make shot, and lead cannonballs from Herculaneum were used in the War of 1812.

Herculaneum was the first county seat of Jefferson County, serving from January 1, 1819, until the seat was moved to Hillsboro in 1839.

Herculaneum held Jefferson County's first post office, and it remained the only post office in the county for nearly thirty years.

Herculaneum was first incorporated on July 27, 1819 - before Missouri was even a state - and after that incorporation lay dormant for over 150 years, a court reactivated it in 1972.

In 1892 the St. Joseph Lead Company began smelting at Herculaneum, and the plant grew into the largest lead smelter in the United States, producing about 225,000 tons of refined lead a year under the Doe Run Company.

Lead pollution from the smelter made Herculaneum a national story: testing found lead dust on the town's roads at 300,000 parts per million, and Doe Run was fined $65 million in a 2010 settlement with the EPA.

The Doe Run smelter closed on December 31, 2013, ending an era in a region that had supplied most of the nation's lead since the 1700s, and the plant was demolished in 2018.

Herculaneum had 4,672 residents at the 2020 census, up sharply from 3,468 in 2010 despite the smelter's closure.