24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Luzerne, IA

Luzerne is a tiny city in Benton County, Iowa, and despite its rural setting it is officially part of the Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Luzerne was platted on April 17, 1868, by Isaac B. Howe, the superintendent of the Iowa Division of the Chicago and North Western Railway, who had the Buckeye station moved two miles east to create the new town — the vanished station site of Buckeye is now empty prairie.

Howe named the town Luzerne after Lucerne, Switzerland, a city he longed to visit but never had.

Because the Chicago & North Western had just connected with the Union Pacific's transcontinental railroad at Council Bluffs, little Luzerne gained a direct rail connection to the Pacific Coast the year after it was founded.

Luzerne was settled largely by Germans — by the late 1870s it had roughly 300 mostly German residents, a public school, and a German Lutheran church whose parochial school enrolled twice as many pupils as the town school.

The 2020 census counted 112 people in Luzerne living in just 31 households, and remarkably 29 of those 31 households were families, with a median age of only 33.

Luzerne actually grew in the last census, jumping 16.7 percent from 96 people in 2010 to 112 in 2020, though it remains far below its 1880 peak of 265.

The entire city of Luzerne covers only about 0.12 square miles, packing its residents in at roughly 850 people per square mile.