Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Montrose, IA

Montrose is a city in Lee County, Iowa, sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River at the head of the Des Moines Rapids.

The Montrose area has been occupied since at least the 1780s, when the Sauk chief Quashquame's village stood nearby, and in 1799 Louis Honoré Tesson received a Spanish land grant here and planted an apple orchard remembered as the first white man's establishment in southeastern Iowa.

Montrose was the site of Fort Des Moines No. 1, a United States military post from 1834 to 1837, and the town's street grid still follows the fort's 1834 layout.

A young Lieutenant Robert E. Lee surveyed and mapped the Des Moines Rapids at Montrose in 1837 for the Army Corps of Engineers.

The town was platted in 1836 and named by David W. Kilbourne; its name was shortened from "Mount of Roses," for the wild roses growing on the hillsides.

From 1839 to 1846 Montrose was home to many Latter-day Saints — including Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and Erastus Snow — who lived in the abandoned fort barracks while the city of Nauvoo was being built across the river in Illinois.

Montrose was incorporated in 1857, and it prospered as a river port where steamboats had to unload, or "lighter," their cargo to get past the Des Moines Rapids — a business that ended when a shipping canal opened at Keokuk.

Montrose's Riverview Park stands on the site of old Fort Des Moines, with views across the Mississippi to Nauvoo, Illinois.

Montrose has celebrated its Watermelon Festival in late August for more than 60 years.

The 2020 census counted 738 people in Montrose living in 314 households, down from a peak of 1,038 residents in 1980.