Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near South Appleton Appleton, MN

Appleton is a city in Swift County in west-central Minnesota, set on the Pomme de Terre River where it flows southwest toward Marsh Lake on the Minnesota River.

Appleton was laid out in 1872 and named after the founder's birthplace of Appleton, Wisconsin; its post office dates to 1873 and the city incorporated in 1881.

The Hastings and Dakota Railroad reached Appleton in 1872, and a flour mill on the banks of the Pomme de Terre River operated from 1872 until the late 1960s.

Appleton calls itself the "Home of Honored Veterans": in 1946, Mayor Robert P. Miller noticed the town's World War II death toll matched its number of streets, and every street and avenue except Minnesota Street was renamed for a fallen local soldier - making Appleton the only town in the United States whose streets are all named for its fallen soldiers.

The 2020 census counted 1,392 people in Appleton; a decade earlier the 2010 census recorded 1,412 people in 677 households.

Appleton is home to the Prairie Correctional Facility, a 1,600-bed private prison the city built in 1991 that held inmates from Minnesota and other states before closing in 2010 and sitting vacant; the roughly 1,000 inmates once counted there explain why the 2000 census showed 2,871 residents.

Elmer A. Benson, who became a United States Senator and then Governor of Minnesota (1937-1939), was born in Appleton on September 22, 1895.

Gethsemane Episcopal Church in Appleton, built in 1879 - the same era as the old Appleton City Hall - was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

U.S. Highway 59 and Minnesota State Highways 7 and 119 are the main road routes through Appleton.

Appleton today hosts a plant-protein factory operated by the food company Eat Just, Inc.