Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Linden, WI

Linden is a village in Iowa County, Wisconsin, located within the Town of Linden on State Highway 39, about eight miles northwest of Mineral Point.

Linden began in 1827 when a traveling Irish peddler named Patrick O'Meara, camping on a creek bank while gathering firewood, stumbled onto an outcropping of lead - the mining camp that grew there was first called Peddler's Creek and later Linden.

Skilled hard-rock miners from Cornwall and Yorkshire, England, immigrated to Linden starting in the 1830s and built a close-knit Cornish mining community; the surname Rule, brought by four miner brothers from Camborne, has been common in Linden ever since.

Linden boomed as a lead-mining town - it had about 950 residents by 1850 - and its miners later left for the mines of Upper Michigan, Butte, Colorado, California and other western camps; the last mine in Linden did not close until 1975.

The Linden Methodist Church, built in 1851 by Cornish masons from native quarried limestone, still stands as the village's major landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A log building erected in 1837 near the Peddler's Creek cemetery served Linden as both its first school and its first Methodist church, and Linden High School operated in the village until it joined the consolidated Iowa-Grant School District in 1959.

The village of Linden did not become a municipality until 1889, decades after the mining camp was founded.

Linden had 504 residents at the 2020 census, down from a modern peak of 615 in 2000; its 549 residents lived in 214 households at the 2010 census.

Linden covers just 0.78 square miles at an elevation of about 1,120 feet in the rolling Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin.

Today Linden's economy is based on farming - dairy, beef, hogs and grain - and village history is kept by the Linden Community Historical Society.