Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Beaconsfield, IA

Beaconsfield is a tiny city in Ringgold County in south-central Iowa that is famous far beyond its size as the birthplace of the Hy-Vee supermarket chain.

Beaconsfield began when the Humeston and Shenandoah Railroad built a train station there, and in 1881 a town company laid it out as a village named after Lord Beaconsfield of England.

Beaconsfield's post office was established in 1882 and closed in 1993, and remarkably the town was not formally incorporated until January 18, 1990 - more than a century after it was founded.

In 1930, Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg opened a general store in Beaconsfield's 1916 Supply Store building; that one small store grew into Hy-Vee, today an employee-owned chain of more than 280 supermarkets across the Midwest and South.

The original Beaconsfield Supply Store building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 and now serves as the town's community building.

The Hy-Vee name itself was only created in 1952, when a company contest produced it as a contraction of the co-founders' names, Hyde and Vredenburg.

Beaconsfield is also the hometown of astronaut Peggy Whitson, who flew on three space expeditions and served as NASA's Chief Astronaut.

The 2020 census counted just 15 people living in 12 households in Beaconsfield; in the 2000 census, with only 11 residents, it was the least populous incorporated city in Iowa, and it is now the second smallest, after Le Roy.

Beaconsfield was once far larger - it peaked at 201 residents in 1930, the very year Hyde and Vredenburg opened the store that became Hy-Vee.

Beaconsfield spreads its 15 residents across 0.73 square miles for a density of only about 21 people per square mile, and its children are served by the Mount Ayr Community School District.