The city 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.
The first European-American settler was Thomas Kirkpatrick, who came in 1805, laid out a community, and served as the Justice of the Peace.
The Edwards Trace, a key trail in the settlement of Central Illinois, used Edwardsville as a northward launching point.
Nelson chose a tract of land just south of Edwardsville to build plumbing factories.
He offered workers fair wages with reasonable working hours and a share of the profits.
Unlike company towns such as Pullman near Chicago, the welfare and quality of life for the workers and their families was a major concern.
The area has a lake and park, baseball field, and the Edwardsville Children's Museum in the former Rudolph D. Specht memorial schoolhouse.
The present county courthouse, a square, four-story neoclassical structure of white marble that rises to six stories at the back section, was constructed from 1913 to 1915.
Scenes for the movie The Lucky Ones, starring Tim Robbins and Rachel McAdams, were filmed in downtown Edwardsville in June 2007.
"[15] Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne recorded "Cocaine" and "Shaky Town" in Edwardsville's Holiday Inn Room 124[16] for his album Running on Empty.
[17][18][19] The book was described by Howard Rambsy II of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as “an artistic map disguised as a volume of poetry”, and by Ainehi Edoro, writing in Brittle Paper, as "a magical meeting place of travelogue, memoir, and poetry.
"[20] An episode of the TV series House Hunters was filmed in Edwardsville and aired in January 2018.
The episode featured a local couple, Zach and Hannah, who grew up and went to school in Edwardsville.