Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Shawnee, OH

Shawnee is a village in Perry County, Ohio — not the Shawnee of Allen County — located in Salt Lick Township about 9 miles south of the county seat, New Lexington.

Shawnee got its start in 1872 when the railroad was extended to that point; the town was platted by investor T. J. Davis on the former Israel Gordon farm and was incorporated as a village in 1874.

The village was named after the Shawnee Indians, and a post office has been in operation at Shawnee since 1872.

Fueled by coal, clay, and oil discoveries, Shawnee exploded into a boomtown, swelling from about 2,800 people in 1880 to nearly 4,000 residents by the early 1900s, drawing immigrant miners from Wales, Ireland, and Eastern Europe.

At its peak Shawnee's downtown of hotels, banks, saloons, and shops earned it the nickname 'the Main Street of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds,' a nod to the region's coal ('black diamonds').

The Knights of Labor Opera House, constructed in 1881, served Shawnee as a union hall, library, and community theater during the coal era.

Shawnee's Main Street Historic District preserves rare surviving examples of Appalachian boomtown architecture — late-19th-century commercial buildings with false-front facades and wooden overhang porches — and the village is regarded as one of the best intact boomtown streetscapes in the eastern United States and a designated Preserve America Community.

The coal boom ended by the 1920s and the last mines and brick factories closed by 1972; the population of Shawnee fell to 505 at the 2020 census, down from 655 in 2010.

Today Shawnee serves as a gateway to the Little Cities of Black Diamonds region and the Wayne National Forest, Ohio's only national forest, and is home to the Shawnee Coal Mining Museum; Tecumseh Lake was built at the edge of town in 1952.