Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Tabor, IA

Tabor is a city in Fremont County that extends northward into Mills County in Iowa's southwestern corner.

Tabor was founded in 1852 by a few families from Oberlin, Ohio — almost all of them Congregationalists — including clergymen George Gaston, Samuel A. Adams, and Reverend John Todd, who chose the high site to found a Christian college.

The founders named their town Tabor after the biblical Mount Tabor, the mountain near Nazareth, the town of Jesus' childhood.

Tabor was incorporated on December 10, 1868, with founder George Gaston elected as its first mayor.

The founders' school became Tabor College, which stood in the city from 1853 until it closed for financial reasons in 1927; during World War II its empty buildings housed German prisoners of war.

Tabor was a major stop on the Underground Railroad — Reverend John Todd, a co-founder of the college, worked as a 'conductor,' residents held monthly abolitionist prayer meetings, and the 1853 Todd House, now a museum, was a station for people escaping slavery.

During the Bleeding Kansas struggle, 200 Sharps rifles sent from Boston for free-state fighters were stored in John Todd's barn in Tabor, and in the winter of 1857–1858 abolitionist John Brown lived in Tabor, assembling and training the men he would lead in the raid on Harpers Ferry.

The Tabor Antislavery Historic District preserves the cluster of abolitionist-era buildings and sites from that period, including the Todd House and Tabor's public square.

Tabor once ran its own railroad — the Tabor & Northern Railway, a nine-mile line connecting with the Wabash Railroad at Malvern, operated by Tabor College from 1889 to 1934.

The 2020 census counted 1,014 people in Tabor, living in 386 households, just below the town's peak of 1,186 in 1920.