Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Thiensville, WI

Thiensville is a village in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, occupying about one square mile on the west bank of a bend in the Milwaukee River.

Thiensville is an enclave community: it is bordered on all sides by the City of Mequon, its much larger neighbor in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.

The village had a population of 3,290 at the 2020 census, remarkably stable compared with 3,235 in 2010 and 3,254 in 2000.

The village is named for Joachim Heinrich Thien — also recorded as John Henry Thien — a German immigrant and freethinker who bought land here in 1842, dammed the Milwaukee River and built a substantial stone flour mill around which the settlement grew.

Before white settlement, a Potawatomi village stood on Pigeon Creek in present-day Thiensville; the Potawatomi surrendered the land to the United States through the 1833 Treaty of Chicago.

Thien's freethinker convictions shaped the village's unusual character — he disavowed organized religion and effectively banned churches in early Thiensville, and the village's first church, a small wood-frame mission, was not built until 1919.

In the late 1800s Thiensville functioned as the downtown for the rural Town of Mequon, with stores, mills and professional services clustered around a stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, built through the area in the early 1870s.

The Village of Thiensville incorporated in 1910 with a population of just 289, and blacksmith John F. Gierach was elected its first village president.

Thiensville's Main Street Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, preserving the village's early commercial buildings.

Thiensville Village Park began in the 1920s, when the Thiensville Athletic Association bought a 14-acre tract along the Milwaukee River near Thien's historic mill dam, which had raised the river by about five feet to power the mill.