Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Coon Valley, WI

Coon Valley is a village in Vernon County in Wisconsin's Driftless Area, set in a steep coulee valley along Coon Creek.

Coon Valley was settled in the 1850s almost entirely by Norwegian immigrants, and it was originally called Helgedalen.

The settlement changed its name to Coon Valley because of the raccoons that were so common along the creek.

Coon Valley was incorporated in 1907.

In 1933 the Coon Creek watershed around the village became the site of the first large-scale soil-erosion demonstration project of the federal Soil Erosion Service, carried out with Civilian Conservation Corps help.

That pioneering conservation work — contour farming, crop rotation, and restored woodlands — transformed Coon Creek from a dying Dust Bowl stream into what is now considered a world-class trout stream.

On August 27–28, 2018, record flash flooding in the Coon Creek watershed breached three flood-control dams and completely submerged Coon Valley's village park, though no one in the village was killed.

Skumsrud Heritage Farm, a preserved Norwegian immigrant farmstead, stands about a mile west of Coon Valley.

Norwegian is no longer fluently spoken in Coon Valley, though a few older residents still remember pieces of its vocabulary and grammar.

Coon Valley had 758 residents at the 2020 census — exactly the same population it had recorded forty years earlier in 1980.