Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Postville, IA

Postville is a small city straddling Allamakee and Clayton counties in northeast Iowa, near the junction of four counties; its motto is 'Hometown to the World.'

Postville is named for Joel Post, a pioneer settler and mill worker who first settled the area in June 1843; the town was platted in 1853 and incorporated in March 1873.

Until around the 1990s, Postville — settled largely by people of German and Norwegian ancestry — was basically all white and all Christian.

In 1987, a group of Hasidic Jews from New York founded Agriprocessors in Postville, a kosher slaughterhouse that grew into the largest plant of its type in the world, employing about 900 people and buying $100 million worth of livestock annually at its peak.

Agriprocessors transformed Postville into one of the most diverse small towns in rural America: by one estimation as many as twenty-seven different cultures — Hasidic Jews, Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants, Eastern Europeans, and later Somali refugees — lived and worked side by side in a town of about 2,400 people.

On May 12, 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Agriprocessors and arrested 389 workers, at the time the largest single immigration raid in U.S. history; those arrested amounted to nearly a fifth of Postville's population.

Agriprocessors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2008, and the plant was bought at auction by SHF Industries in July 2009 and resumed production under the name Agri Star; by 2017 about 700 people — more than 30 percent of Postville's population — worked at Agri Star.

The population of Postville was 2,503 at the 2020 census, up 12.4 percent from 2010 as the town recovered from the post-raid exodus.

Postville has about 788 households, and with a median age of just 29.4 years in 2020 it is far younger than the typical Iowa town.

Hispanic or Latino residents made up 43.0 percent of Postville's population in the 2020 census, an extraordinary share for a rural Iowa community.