Edwardsville is a city in and the county seat of Madison County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 26,808. The city was named in honor of Ninian Edwards, then Governor of the Illinois Territory. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Edwardsville Arts Center, the Edwardsville Journal, the Madison County Record, and the Edwardsville Intelligencer are based here. Edwardsville High School and Metro-East Lutheran High School serve students in the area. Edwardsville also serves as the headquarters for Prairie Farms Dairy one of the largest dairy cooperatives in the United States and ranked in the top 10 of the largest privately held companies in the St. Louis region. Edwardsville is a part of Southern Illinois and the Metro East region within Greater St. Louis, located northeast of downtown St. Louis. It is part of the Edwardsville School District, which also includes the villages of Glen Carbon, Hamel and Moro, as well as the township areas around them. History Edwardsville was incorporated in 1818. The first European-American settler was Thomas Kirkpatrick, who came in 1805, laid out a community, and served as the Justice of the Peace. He named the community after his friend Ninian Edwards, then territorial governor of Illinois. (Illinois did not become a state until 1818.) The Edwards Trace, a key trail in the settlement of Central Illinois, used Edwardsville as a northward launching point. In 1868 The Bank of Edwardsville was founded. It was purchased by Champaign, Illinois-based Busey Bank in 2019. In 1890, St. Louis industrialist N.O. Nelson chose a tract of land just south of Edwardsville to build plumbing factories. He also built a model workers' cooperative village called Leclaire. He offered workers fair wages with reasonable working hours and a share of the profits. He named the village in honor of the French economist Edme-Jean Leclaire. The village also provided educational and recreational opportunities and made it financially possible for anyone to own a home. Unlike company towns such as Pullman near Chicago, the welfare and quality of life for the workers and their families was a major concern. In 1934, the Village of Leclaire was incorporated into the City of Edwardsville. The area has a lake and park, baseball field, and the Edwardsville Children's Museum in the former Rudolph D. Specht memorial schoolhouse. Several Nelson factory buildings were renovated and adapted for use as the historic N. O. Nelson Campus