Meriden, Illinois

11 topographic sheets cover this place, the earliest surveyed in 1952 and the latest in 1993. It stands in Meriden Township. It lies in ZIP code area 60518. It stands on Fourmile Grove Creek. The Survey maps it on the Mendota East quadrangle.

Meriden within LaSalle County

Topographic sheets covering this place

6 surveys from 11 printed sheets

Matched by testing this settlement's coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet in the United States Geological Survey's historical collection. Each opens the scanned sheet at the Survey.

1952 USGS Mendota quadrangle1:62500, 3 printings
1958 USGS Aurora quadrangle1:250000, 3 printings
1961 USGS Aurora quadrangle1:250000
1982 USGS Mendota East quadrangle1:24000
1985 USGS Dixon quadrangle1:100000, 2 printings
1993 USGS Mendota East quadrangle1:24000

What happened here

An account from the chapter on Meriden township. The inset identifies its exact source book and publication year.

From History of LaSalle County, Illinois : Its Topography, Geology, Botany, Natural History, History of the Mound Builders, Indian Tribes, French Explorations, and a Sketch of the Pioneer Settlers of Each Town to 1840, with an Appendix, Giving the Present Status of the County, Its Population, Resources, Manufactures and Institutions, published 1877 - Meriden Township

Fauna Of La Salle Cou

The Fauna of this locality, from the open and exposed character of the country, did not embrace those animals which delight fn the seclusion of the dense forest - the bear, the panther, was not known; or, if known, only as trosient visltors. But those adapted to the country appear, from the testimony of the Franeh explorers and other sources, to have existed in immenes numbent 11 was a country prolific of animal life - but limited tn species.

Read the rest of this passage

In the county-history sources

11,490 words on this township

History of LaSalle County, Illinois : Its Topography, Geology, Botany, Natural History, History of the Mound Builders, Indian Tribes, French Explorations, and a Sketch of the Pioneer Settlers of Each Town to 1840, with an Appendix, Giving the Present Status of the County, Its Population, Resources, Manufactures and Institutions, published 1877 names this settlement in its chapter on Meriden Township. These are the passages that mention it, exactly as the scans read.

Township 36, Range 2, constitutes the town of Meriden. It is bounded on the north by the north line of the county, and is a prairie region, sur- rounded by prairie on all sides except a small grove on Sees. Sand 6, called Fonr-Mile Grove. Afew families pitched their tents around the little oasis in the middle of the wide prairie, in the year 1896, and these were all the early settlers.

Passage source: History of LaSalle County, Illinois : Its Topography, Geology, Botany, Natural History, History of the Mound Builders, Indian Tribes, French Explorations, and a Sketch of the Pioneer Settlers of Each Town to 1840, with an Appendix, Giving the Present Status of the County, Its Population, Resources, Manufactures and Institutions, published 1877.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Meriden Township.

Storms near this place

4 since 2023

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Meriden in 4 storm reports between 2023 and 2025: 3 hail, 1 thunderstorm wind. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
March 2023	Thunderstorm Wind	Meriden	-	Two semi trucks were reported to had blown over on I-39 northeast of Mendota. Wind magnitude and time were estimated based on radar.
April 2023	Hail	Meriden	-	A windshield was broken on Interstate 39 near mile marker 74 due to hail which was estimated to be ping pong ball size.
April 2023	Hail	Meriden	-	Photos showed golf ball size hail near Meridan.
March 2025	Hail	Meriden	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in LaSalle County

Nearest settlements

The eight closest, with where each one stands in the county. Distances are straight-line, computed from the Geographic Names Information System coordinates.

Place	Distance	Sheets
Mendota	4.8 miles	11
Triumph	5.0 miles	20
Earlville	6.0 miles	8
Culton (historical)	7.5 miles	20
Troy Grove	7.6 miles	20
Peterstown	7.9 miles	19
Prairie Center	8.8 miles	25
Waltham	9.6 miles	20

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 413426. The sheet list is computed by point-in-boundary test against the United States Geological Survey's historical topographic inventory. Both are works of the United States government and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.

Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.