Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Hopkinton, IA

Hopkinton is a city in Delaware County in eastern Iowa, near the Maquoketa River.

Hopkinton grew out of a settlement that began in the late 1840s around sawmills built on the Maquoketa River and Plum Creek; the town was laid out in 1850 and incorporated on March 3, 1874.

Hopkinton was the home of Lenox College, founded in 1859 as the Bowen Collegiate Institute and the oldest Presbyterian college in Iowa, which operated in town until it closed in 1944.

Lenox College earned the nickname "Home of the Volunteers" during the Civil War: on May 17, 1864, all but two of its male students enlisted in the Union Army, led by the college's own president, the Reverend James McKean, who served as their captain.

In 1865 a Civil War monument was raised on the Lenox campus inscribed with the names of students who died in the war - it was the first Civil War monument ever erected on a college campus, and the town still remembers the story during its annual Civil War Days celebration.

The old Lenox College campus survives almost intact as the Delaware County Historical Museum Complex, a nine-building complex listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hopkinton's newspaper, The Hopkinton Leader, was owned at the turn of the century by Frank F. Merriam, who went on to become Governor of California; his brothers Charles Merriam, the influential University of Chicago political scientist, and John Merriam, the noted paleontologist, also came from Hopkinton.

Hopkinton peaked at 841 residents in 1940, and the 2020 census counted 622 people living in 261 households.

Today Hopkinton students attend the Maquoketa Valley Community School District.