Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Hawarden, IA

Hawarden is a city in Sioux County in far northwestern Iowa, located on the Big Sioux River along the South Dakota border.

Hawarden was platted in 1882 by the Western Town Lot Company and named for Hawarden Castle in Wales, the home of British statesman William Ewart Gladstone.

Hawarden was incorporated as a city on March 18, 1887, after residents voted 97 to 3 in favor of separating from the rival settlement of Calliope.

Hawarden's roots trace to Calliope, a settlement begun in 1861 about a mile north of the present city center that served as Sioux County's first county seat, where a log courthouse housed the county government.

In January 1872, Dutch settlers from Orange City traveled to Calliope by horse-drawn sleighs, forcibly entered the courthouse, and carried off the county records and the county safe in a famous county-seat fight; later that year voters approved moving the county seat to Orange City, effective January 1873.

The rivalry ended in 1893, when Calliope was consolidated into Hawarden; the old settlement is now the northern part of the city and is commemorated by Calliope Village, an open-air museum of pioneer buildings.

The population of Hawarden was 2,700 at the 2020 census, up 6 percent from 2010.

Hawarden has about 1,036 households, and Hispanic or Latino residents made up about 27 percent of its population in the 2020 census.

Hawarden's schools — West Sioux Elementary and West Sioux High/Middle School — are part of the West Sioux Community School District, formed in the fall of 1959 by Hawarden, Ireton, Chatsworth, and the surrounding rural areas.

Hawarden was formerly home to a junior college, Sioux Empire College, which closed in the 1980s.