Mill Shoals, Illinois experiences a humid continental climate, characterized by hot summers and cold winters.

Additionally, Mill Shoals is located in an area that is prone to severe thunderstorms and tornadoes during the spring and summer months.

In addition to crop production, the area is also home to several livestock farms, including beef and dairy cattle, pigs, and poultry.

These farms not only provide food for the local community but also contribute to the economy through job creation and the sale of agricultural products.

[9] Mill Shoals is located in Illinois, two-thirds of the way from St. Louis, Missouri, to Evansville, Indiana, at the juncture of Interstate 64 and U.S. Highway 45.

[10] "Inside a 200 mile radius of Mill Shoals is a unique geographical and historical area described as the Mid-America Basin.

The retreating glacier left rich mineral deposits of oil, coal, and fluorite to await 20th Century exploitation, and ground out a fine top-soil that was to yield vast timber areas of maple, ash, and oak, as well as fertile fields of wheat, corn, barley, and soybeans, As early as 15,000 B. C., pre-historic Indian peoples hunted the mammoths that roamed the area and eventually developed a series of substantial civilizations of the mounds and of the woodlands, climaxing in the Illini Confederation of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

In the 18th Century, French and English explorers competed for these lands beginning with Marquette and Joliet in 1673 and ending with the American conquest under George Rogers Clark in 1778, when the Province of Virginia claimed the territory west to the Mississippi River.

Subsequently, the area became the commercial, cultural, and political center for the new frontier--until the construction of the Illinois-Michigan Canal in 1848 shifted the focus northward to Chicago.

Significant among early 19th Century settlements were experiments in comprehensive self-sufficient communities such as Albion, Illinois, and New Harmony, Indiana, both in the Mill Shoals vicinity.

With the advent of the Mill Shoals Human Development Project the Mid-American Basin once again becomes a staging area for the nation's effort to pioneer authentic local community.

Once the home of a thriving barrel-making industry which depleted the nearby virgin forests Mill Shoals had primarily been an agriculture village until 1939 when oil was discovered in the area.

However, the town was greatly devastated by a large fire in the early forties and seventies and retains the authentic WPA Post office mural.

Many residents commute to nearby towns for employment including education, service, factories, and farms.From the Institute of Cultural Affairs 1978 Human Development Project Report[10]:"Mill Shoals is a representative mid-American small town with a population of 314 people situated in White County in southern Illinois.

U. S. Highway 45 passes north-south through the center of town, and a spur of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, built in 1870, brings two freight trains weekly.

The town is governed by an elected mayor and council, who were responsible for a water supply system and a new grade school in 1965.

Mill Shoals sometimes refers to itself as the key ring capital of the world, an outgrowth of the ring binder, invented by Henry T. Adams of Mill Shoals in 1902, Besides the Adams Manufacturing Company is the Behimer and Kissner Grain Elevator and the more recent Grace Agricultural Products (chemical fertilizers).

Powerful but transitory economic resources have involved Mill Shoals in booms of productivity followed by periods of depression, depletion of strength and dispersion of employment.

As the nation becomes more dependent on local energy sources, Mill Shoals could well be near the center of a potential coal boom.

[10]"Public facilities include a post office, the elementary school, a combination town hall and fire station.

The 176 housing units in Mill Shoals are mainly small, single family dwellings, nearly one fourth of which are mobile homes.

Drainage for the considerable overflow is through open ditches, prohibiting normal laundry activity within the community and occasioning a serious health hazard.

Ancestry of the Village of Mill Shoals is 9.8% English, 38.2% German, 20.8% Irish, 2.9% Italian, 1.2% Norwegian, 11.6% Polish, 0% Scottish, 0% Subs-saharan Africa, and 0% French.