Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Waseca, MN

Waseca is the county seat of Waseca County in southern Minnesota, and its name is a Dakota language word meaning "rich in provisions."

Waseca was platted in July 1867 where the railroad established a stop, and within a year it had become a major shipping hub for wheat with 129 buildings and about 700 people.

Waseca was incorporated as a village on March 2, 1868, and as a city on February 23, 1881.

Waseca had a population of 9,229 at the 2020 census.

The 2020 census counted 3,607 households in Waseca.

About 1.2 of Waseca's roughly 5.2 square miles is water, including Clear Lake and Loon Lake, and in 2014 the city completed an eight-foot-wide asphalt bike path surrounding Clear Lake.

Waseca was home to the University of Minnesota Waseca, a two-year technical college that grew out of a 1912 experimental farm and the Southern School of Agriculture boarding school, served nearly 20,000 students, and closed in 1992.

Part of the former University of Minnesota Waseca campus now houses the Federal Correctional Institution, Waseca, a low-security federal prison for women, while the rest continues as the university's Southern Research and Outreach Center with 926 acres of research farmland.

Edgar F. Johnson and his wife Ethel founded the E.F. Johnson Company in Waseca in 1923, growing it from a mail-order radio-parts business into a major defense supplier during World War II; the former E.F. Johnson building is now a museum of the Waseca County Historical Society.

George Herter launched Herter's, a pioneering mail-order outdoor gear retailer, in Waseca in 1937, and Brown Printing, founded in Waseca in 1949, grew into a national magazine printer.