24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Mount Vernon, IA

Mount Vernon was laid out in 1847 along the old Military Road between Dubuque and Iowa City, where a rest stop called Pinhook had stood since at least 1838, and it was renamed for George Washington's Virginia estate.

The 2020 census counted 4,527 people in Mount Vernon, living in 1,387 households and 976 families, as part of the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area.

Mount Vernon is home to Cornell College, founded in 1853 by Methodist minister George Bowman as the Iowa Conference Seminary and renamed in 1857 for iron tycoon William Wesley Cornell, a distant cousin of Cornell University founder Ezra Cornell.

Cornell College's entire hilltop campus was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, making it one of very few American colleges whose whole campus carries that distinction.

Cornell is famous for its One Course At A Time calendar, in which students take a single subject per 3.5-week block for eight blocks a year, and the college enrolls roughly 1,000 students.

Mount Vernon's Cole Library is shared by Cornell College and the general public, described as the only private-college and community shared library in the country.

The town sits atop a paha, a wind-formed sand and loess ridge about a mile long that rises up to 100 feet above the surrounding farmland, with Cornell's campus crowning one end and Uptown Mount Vernon at the other.

Thanks to all those college students, Mount Vernon's median age at the 2020 census was just 28.2 years, far younger than a typical Iowa town.

Each May since 2006, Mount Vernon hosts Chalk the Walk, billed as Iowa's largest Madonnari sidewalk-chalk festival, where more than 300 artists use over half a ton of chalk to cover Uptown's main street.

Budget Travel magazine named Mount Vernon one of 'America's Coolest Small Towns' in 2009, praising its coffee, food and independent shop owners.