Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Lawrence, MA

Lawrence is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River, and at the 2020 census the city had a population of 89,143, with 28,955 households.

The first settlement within the present-day city limits came in 1655 with a blockhouse in Shawsheen Fields, now South Lawrence, and the community was incorporated as a town in 1847 and as a city in 1853, named for Abbott Lawrence.

Lawrence was created as a planned mill city by the Essex Company, which was incorporated on April 16, 1845, and the first excavations for the Great Stone Dam to harness the Merrimack River's water power were done on August 1, 1845.

Lawrence and Salem were the county seats of Essex County until the state abolished county government in 1999, and Lawrence is part of the Merrimack Valley.

The Pemberton Mill collapse on January 10, 1860, killed 88 workers according to the official death toll, with estimates of 116 to 145 deaths, and it was one of the deadliest industrial accidents in United States history.

In 1912 Lawrence mill workers staged the Bread and Roses Strike, one of the more important and widely reported labor struggles in American history, and the mill owners settled after two bitterly cold winter months, giving workers raises of up to 20 percent.

Lawrence was a great wool-processing center until that industry declined in the 1950s, and the city's population fell from a high of 94,270 in 1920 to approximately 64,000 residents in 1980, its low point.

Immigrants from the Dominican Republic and migrants from Puerto Rico began arriving in Lawrence in significant numbers in the late 1960s, and Hispanic or Latino residents comprised 81.7 percent of the city's population in the 2020 census.

Lawrence is the birthplace of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1918 and of the singer Robert Goulet in 1933, and the poet Robert Frost spent his early school years in Lawrence, where his essays and poems were first published in the Lawrence High School newspaper.

Lawrence Heritage State Park and the Great Stone Dam are among the city's points of interest, along with Campagnone Common, the High Service Water Tower and Reservoir, and the Lawrence History Center.