Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Hurley, WI

Hurley is the county seat and largest city of Iron County, which at 6,137 residents in 2020 was the third-least populous county in Wisconsin.

The city sits on the Montreal River directly across from Ironwood, Michigan, with the river forming the Wisconsin-Michigan state line, and it is the northern terminus of U.S. Highway 51, about 18 miles south of Lake Superior.

Hurley took its name from M. A. Hurley, a Wausau attorney who won a lawsuit for the Northern Chief Iron Company in 1884 and asked for no fee, only that the town be named after him; it was called Glen Hurley for one year before the name was shortened in 1885.

Hurley had its origins in the iron mining and lumbering booms of the 1880s at the center of the Gogebic Range, also called the Penokee Range.

The Germania mine, inside the city limits, was the first iron-ore shipping mine on the Wisconsin side of the Gogebic Range, sending its first ore by rail to Ashland on July 16, 1885.

The nearby Montreal Mine was one of the deepest iron mines in North America, reaching more than 3,000 feet down, and it shipped over 41 million tons of iron ore before closing on August 10, 1962.

Two fires in the summer of 1888 destroyed almost the entire business district, but merchants rebuilt Silver Street in brick and stone, making the new buildings nearly fireproof.

Hurley stood at the center of a boundary dispute between Michigan and Wisconsin that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1926 decision in Michigan v. Wisconsin, confirming that Hurley and its valuable mineral deposits belonged to Wisconsin.

During Prohibition, Hurley was regarded as the most infamous town in Wisconsin: federal agents padlocked 29 saloons in a single day on December 27, 1926, and a 1931 raid closed 42 saloons and arrested 60 people, and a federal investigator called it the worst community in the state.

Hurley did not become a city until April 1918, and Henry Meade served as its first mayor.