618 Area Code 🌍☎️

Collinsville, Illinois is a city of 24,366 residents located approximately 14 miles east of St. Louis in Madison and St. Clair counties, serving as part of the St. Louis Metro East region. The city is home to Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and National Historic Landmark featuring Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas and larger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was built by the Mississippian culture and peaked around 1200 CE with a population of 20,000-30,000. Originally settled by the Cook family and German-American farmers who arrived from Pennsylvania in 1812 to found Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Collinsville is also famous for the Brooks Catsup Bottle Water Tower, the world's largest ketchup bottle, and is branded as the world's horseradish capital. The city's notable historical structures include its 1885 Italianate City Hall built on Collins family property, the 1916 State Bank of Collinsville featuring limestone and marble construction, and the colonial-style Public Library completed in 1937 with later additions in 1967 and 1980. Collinsville's history includes the tragic 1918 wartime lynching of German immigrant Robert Prager by a mob of up to 300 local coal miners - the only such documented wartime mob murder in the United States - after which eleven men were tried but acquitted on June 1, 1918. East St. Louis is a city in St. Clair County, Illinois, located across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis, Missouri, in the Metro East region of Southern Illinois. The city was Illinois's fourth-largest in 1950 with a population of 82,366, but declined dramatically to 18,469 residents by the 2020 census, representing less than one-quarter of its peak. Founded in 1797 by Revolutionary War veteran Captain James Piggott as a ferry service connecting Illinoistown to St. Louis, the municipality was officially established on April 1, 1861, when residents voted 183-to-rename it from Illinoistown. East St. Louis experienced extensive industrial growth following the Civil War through meatpacking, stockyards, and proximity to coal mines, and became a center of labor activism during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The city's most notable landmark is the Gateway Geyser, added to Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park in 1994, which shot water 630 feet high to complement the Gateway Arch before closing in 2023. Carbondale is a city in Jackson County, Illinois within the Southern Illinois region known as "Little Egypt," located 96 miles southeast of St. Louis on the northern edge of the Shawnee National Forest, with a 2020 population of 25,083. Founded in August 1853 by Daniel Harmon Brush, John Asgill Conner, and Dr. William Richart on 360 acres between proposed railroad stations, the city was named for its large coal deposits and developed as a transportation and business hub after the first train arrived on July 4, 1854. Carbondale is home to Southern Illinois University, which opened as Southern Illinois Normal University in 1874 and was renamed in 1947, now enrolling nearly 18,000 students as a national research university. The city gained historical significance as the site of one of the first formal Memorial Day observations on April 29, 1866, where General John A. Logan, a local resident and co-founder of the Grand Army of the Republic, delivered the principal address that led to the creation of the national holiday. Major highways Illinois Route 13 and U.S. Route 51 intersect in Carbondale, which was historically called the "Athens of Egypt" due to its educational institutions and regional prominence.