Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Clinton, IA

Clinton is the county seat of Clinton County and sits on the western shore of the Mississippi River — it is the easternmost city in Iowa.

Clinton had a population of 24,469 at the 2020 census, down from 26,885 in 2010, and Census Bureau QuickFacts counts about 10,754 households in the city, averaging 2.21 people each.

Clinton was platted in 1836 as the town of New York by Joseph Bartlett, who believed the area was rich in gold; it was later renamed for DeWitt Clinton, the sixth governor of New York, and was incorporated on January 26, 1857.

The neighboring town of Lyons, founded by Elijah Buell in 1837 on the site of a ferry crossing at 'the Narrows,' grew alongside Clinton and eventually merged into it.

Between the 1850s and 1900, Clinton was regarded as the 'Lumber Capital of the World' — huge log rafts were floated down the Mississippi from Wisconsin and Minnesota, milled in Clinton, and shipped out by river and rail.

Clinton's sawmills produced more than 195 million board feet of lumber in 1892, and lumber barons such as W. J. Young, Chancy Lamb, and David Joyce were counted among 13 millionaires living in the city during the boom.

The last logging raft arrived in Clinton in 1906 as the northern forests were depleted, and roughly a quarter of the city's 22,000 residents left after the mills closed.

The pool of the Mississippi River above Lock and Dam No. 13 at Clinton is the widest section of the entire river, about 1.8 miles across.

The Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge runs through Clinton along the riverfront.

Construction on Clinton's first railroad bridge across the Mississippi began in 1856, and the city became a key division point on the Chicago and North Western railroad.