Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Fort Dodge, IA

Fort Dodge is the county seat of Webster County and a major commercial center for north-central and northwest Iowa.

The city began in 1850 as a U.S. Army post - first called Fort Clarke - built where Lizard Creek meets the Des Moines River; it was renamed in 1851 for Senator Henry Dodge.

The Army abandoned the fort in 1853, a town was laid out on the site in 1854, and Fort Dodge was chartered as a city in 1869.

The 2020 census counted 24,871 people in Fort Dodge, slightly down from 25,206 in 2010.

Census QuickFacts counts about 10,272 households in Fort Dodge, with roughly 64 percent of homes owner-occupied and a median owner-occupied home value around $144,100.

Fort Dodge sits at the junction of U.S. Routes 20 and 169 and was nicknamed the "Gypsum City" for the huge gypsum beds east of town, still worked today by companies such as National Gypsum, Georgia-Pacific, and U.S. Gypsum.

The famous Cardiff Giant - one of the most celebrated hoaxes of the 1800s, a fake "petrified man" - was carved from a block of gypsum mined at Fort Dodge in 1868 before being "discovered" near Cardiff, New York, in 1869 and exposed by Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh.

A replica of the Cardiff Giant is displayed at the Fort Museum and Frontier Village on the southwest edge of town, a full-scale recreation of the original prairie outpost that also hosts the annual Frontier Days celebration.

Fort Dodge is home to the Blanden Memorial Art Museum, which opened on June 5, 1932, and was the first public art museum in the state of Iowa.

Iowa Central Community College, founded in 1966, is based in Fort Dodge and serves as the educational hub for the surrounding region.