Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Grafton, WI

Grafton is a village in Ozaukee County about 20 miles north of Milwaukee on the Milwaukee River, a suburban community in the Milwaukee metropolitan area along Interstate 43.

Timothy Wooden, who arrived in 1839, is considered Grafton's first permanent white settler; the settlement was first called Hamburg for a German founder's hometown, and the village incorporated on March 30, 1896.

Grafton began as a mill town, with German and Irish immigrants harnessing the Milwaukee River for gristmills and woolen mills starting with the Grafton Flour Mill in 1846.

The Milwaukee Falls Lime Company quarried limestone and burned lime in Grafton for decades, and three of its five original kilns are preserved today in Lime Kiln Park beside 40-foot Silurian dolomite bluffs.

Grafton holds an outsized place in American music history: the Wisconsin Chair Company's Paramount Records plant and studio operated in the village from 1929 into the 1930s, recording Delta blues pioneers such as Charley Patton, Son House and Willie Brown, who traveled from the South to record there.

Paramount, founded in 1917 as a subsidiary selling phonographs and records, became one of the first and largest producers of blues and jazz records for African-American buyers, with an estimated quarter of all race records released between 1922 and 1932 on its label.

Grafton's blues legacy earned it a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, one of the few trail sites outside the American South, and downtown's Paramount Plaza honors the recordings made there.

The 2020 census counted 12,094 people and 5,415 households in Grafton, with 5,632 housing units.

Suburbanization transformed Grafton after World War II: the population grew five-fold from 1,489 in 1950 to 8,381 in 1980 as farmland was annexed for subdivisions, helped by Interstate 43's construction in the mid-1960s.

The village's public library is the U.S.S. Liberty Memorial Public Library, named through a contested 1989 donation to honor the American servicemen killed in the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.