Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Hanging Rock, OH

Hanging Rock is a village in Lawrence County, Ohio, sitting along the Ohio River in the state's southern tip.

Hanging Rock got its start in 1820, when European Americans built a charcoal blast furnace at the site and a village grew up around the furnace workers.

The village takes its name from a high, imposing cliff that leans out over the Ohio River, which Native Americans are said to have used as a lookout over river traffic.

This little village gave its name to the famous Hanging Rock Iron Region, an iron-making district of more than 1,000 square miles reaching into Kentucky and West Virginia; by 1884 some 42 furnaces were operating in the region's Ohio section alone.

Hanging Rock was the forerunner of nearby Ironton, and in the 1840s it was described as the great iron emporium of Lawrence County, with a church, four stores, a forge, a rolling mill, a foundry and about 150 inhabitants, while pig iron from upcountry furnaces was loaded onto barges at its Union Landing.

The village's population peaked in 1890, and it shrank as industrial changes cut the need for furnace labor.

The 2020 census counted 204 people in Hanging Rock, down from 221 in 2010, when the census recorded 95 households in the village.