Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Guttenberg, IA

Guttenberg is a city in Clayton County, Iowa, on the Mississippi River across from Wisconsin along U.S. Route 52, and it is the largest town in Clayton County.

French explorers gave the site its first name in 1673 — Prairie La Porte, meaning "the door to the prairie" — and the area served as Sauk and Meskwaki campgrounds until 1823, opening to legal settlement with the Black Hawk Purchase of 1833.

Guttenberg was Clayton County's first county seat, holding that role from 1838 to 1843 before losing it.

Beginning in 1845, hundreds of German immigrants arrived under the Western Settlement Society of Cincinnati, and by 1850 the town was sizable and nearly all German.

The city is named for Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type printing, and many of its streets honor German writers and thinkers such as Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Lessing; the public library displays a replica of a Bible printed by Gutenberg.

Between 1845 and 1865 Guttenberg's German settlers built more than one hundred stone buildings from the local bluff limestone, and many survive today in the Front Street Historic District, including the pre-Civil War Albertus Building.

Guttenberg was incorporated in 1851, and in its steamboat-era heyday it had four large riverside warehouses, a big flour mill, stores and hotels trading in farm produce, milled flour and lead ore from Miners Creek.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Lock and Dam No. 10 stands on the Mississippi River at Guttenberg, guiding barge traffic past the town.

Guttenberg's worst Mississippi River flood came in 1965, after which a levee was built to protect the city.

Guttenberg had 1,817 residents in the 2020 census, living in 867 households, down from a peak of 2,428 people in 1980.