Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Hawley, MN

Hawley is a city in Clay County in northwestern Minnesota, set along the Buffalo River about 23 miles east of Moorhead in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Hawley went through six name changes after 1871 before settling in 1872 on the name of Thomas Hawley Canfield, an officer of the Northern Pacific Railway, which laid out the town.

General George Armstrong Custer visited Hawley in 1876, an episode later retold in WCCO Television's bicentennial short film Incident at Hawley.

Part of Hawley was settled by a colony of immigrants from Yeovil, Somerset, England, among them Elisabeth Chant, who later became a painter in Minneapolis.

The 2020 census counted 2,219 people in Hawley in 897 households, and the city has grown in every census since 1880, when it had just 77 residents.

Hawley is best known as the town where Robert Asp built the Viking ship Hjemkomst — construction began in a converted potato warehouse in 1973, the building had to be demolished in 1980 to get the ship out, and in 1982 the ship sailed from Duluth to Bergen, Norway.

Amtrak's Empire Builder passes through Hawley on the BNSF tracks along U.S. Route 10 but does not stop; the nearest stations are Fargo and Detroit Lakes, each 23 miles away.

The Hawley Public School district keeps separate buildings for grades K-6 and 7-12, and its football team has won numerous conference and section championships.

Hawley's motto is 'A Family Friendly Community,' and the town is served by radio station KNNZ and the Hawley Herald newspaper.

Hawley is one of Minnesota's younger small cities — its median age in 2020 was just 35.6 years, with nearly 30% of residents under 18.