Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Yarmouth, IA

Yarmouth is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in northwestern Des Moines County, Iowa — it has never been an incorporated city.

The village was laid out by Andrew C. Kline, who arrived in 1876 and opened a general store; a blacksmith set up shop around the same time.

In 1881, around the time the Burlington and Northwestern Railway arrived, the La Vega post office about a mile to the east was moved to the village and renamed Yarmouth.

By 1885 Yarmouth had close to 100 residents and boasted three general stores, a drug store, a blacksmith shop, a billiard hall, and two churches.

By 1897 the village had a stock yard across the tracks from the depot, two grain elevators, and a lumber yard, and by 1905 it had its own Masonic lodge, Federal Lodge No. 445, and the Mutual Telephone Company of Yarmouth.

The 2020 census counted just 61 people in 29 households in Yarmouth, a steep fall from the 177 residents recorded there in 1940.

Yarmouth gave its name to geology: the buried soil layer known as the Yarmouth paleosol — and the former 'Yarmouth interglacial' era — were named for glacial deposits studied around the village, which sits on a terminal moraine ridge of the Illinoian glaciation.

Yarmouth lies in Des Moines County, one of Iowa's two original counties organized in 1834, whose county seat is Burlington on the Mississippi River.