Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Ellston, IA

Ellston is a tiny city in Ringgold County in south-central Iowa, not far from the Missouri border.

Ellston began in 1881 as the village of Wirt, when the firm of Cochran & Le Fever built a general store in anticipation of the railroad; the Humeston and Shenandoah Railroad established a station there in March 1882.

In 1895 the town's name was changed from Wirt to Ellston so that its mail would stop being confused with the nearby town of Van Wert.

Ellston's western border is county road P-64, a road that was originally part of the historic Dragoon Trace.

Ellston peaked at 242 residents in the 1900 census, but the 2020 census counted only 19 people living in 9 households, making it one of the smallest incorporated cities in Iowa.

In the 1910s Ellston was famously taken in by promoters who borrowed $30,000 from the local bank to build a telephone factory - the factory never produced a single telephone, the bank folded, and the 1914 factory building later became part of the Ringgold County Pioneer Center museum.

Harley A. Wilhelm, the Manhattan Project chemist who invented the Ames Process used to purify uranium for the atomic bomb, was born on a farm near Ellston.