Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Dutchtown, MO

Dutchtown is a census-designated place and former village in Cape Girardeau County, located at the intersection of Missouri Routes 25 and 74 southwest of Cape Girardeau.

In 1799, the first Protestant sermon and baptism by immersion west of the Mississippi River was performed in Randol Creek near modern-day Dutchtown.

The settlement traces back to Martin Rodner, a Hessian soldier who came to America in 1776 to fight for the British and moved his family to the area in 1801, where he owned a water mill on Hubble Creek.

Swiss and German families who settled near the mill in the mid-1830s first called their settlement Spencer; it later became Dutchtown, a variation of "Deutsch," the German word for German.

Dutchtown's German Evangelical Church, founded in 1836 and rebuilt in brick in 1887, was nicknamed the "Swamp Church" because the village was built on the edge of a swamp.

Dutchtown was incorporated in February 1998 but disincorporated on March 15, 2018, after repeated flooding — in 1973, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2011, 2013, 2016 and 2017 — drove residents to seek federal buyouts of their properties.

The 2020 census counted 163 people in Dutchtown; a decade earlier, as an incorporated village, it had just 94 residents in 33 households.