Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Sturgeon, MO

Sturgeon is a small city in northern Boone County in central Missouri, and it is part of the Columbia metropolitan area.

Sturgeon was laid out in 1856 and named for Isaac H. Sturgeon, superintendent of the North Missouri Railroad, after six local citizens paid $6,000 to secure the railroad depot for the town.

Sturgeon was incorporated in 1859, with Housen Canada as its first mayor, and the town charter was renewed in 1875.

The town's first schoolhouse was built in 1857, and by 1882 Sturgeon's white and Black schools together enrolled 301 students.

One of Sturgeon's first industries was a broom factory established in 1878 that made brooms from locally grown broom corn and by 1882 was turning out about 360 brooms a day.

A tornado struck Sturgeon in the spring of 1857, barely a year after the town was founded, blowing down several houses including a new three-story hotel building.

Since the first Amish family settled just north of Sturgeon in the fall of 1953, the local Old Order Amish community has grown to more than sixty families who run home businesses selling sorghum, eggs, produce, and peanut brittle.

The 2020 census counted 907 people in Sturgeon, up from 872 in 2010, keeping the town close to the size it first reached in 1980.

Sturgeon had 361 households at the 2010 census, and its median age of about 40 years reflects a mix of young families and long-time residents.

Children in Sturgeon attend the Sturgeon R-V School District, whose teams are the Bulldogs, and the town's Masonic lodge building is one of its historic landmarks.