Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Barton West Bend, WI

West Bend is the county seat of Washington County and part of the Milwaukee metropolitan area, sitting on a westward bend of the Milwaukee River that gave the city its name.

The city traces its origin to 1845, when commissioners Byron Kilbourn, James Kneeland and Erastus B. Wolcott chose the river bend as a halfway stop on the road between Fond du Lac and Milwaukee, and Wolcott built a dam and sawmill there in 1846 and a gristmill in 1848.

West Bend became the Washington County seat in 1853, when the legislature split off Ozaukee County — and officials in Port Washington were so unwilling to give up the role that they refused to hand over the county records for several months.

West Bend was incorporated as a village in 1868 and as a city in March 1885, and in 1961 it annexed the neighboring Village of Barton, which had once been larger than West Bend itself.

The 2020 census counted 31,752 people in West Bend living in 13,749 households, up from just 6,849 residents in 1950.

Several dozen pre-Columbian effigy mounds built between about 650 and 1300 CE survive around West Bend and are protected on the National Register of Historic Places as the Washington County "Island" Effigy Mound District.

Amity Leather, founded in West Bend in 1915, grew into the world's largest manufacturer of leather billfolds, while the West Bend Aluminum Company, started in 1911, built a national name in aluminum cookware.

West Bend is home to the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the state's primary museum dedicated to Wisconsin art, which began in 1961 as the West Bend Gallery of Fine Arts and moved into a striking new riverfront building in 2013.

Regner Park, a few blocks north of downtown, is the city's most popular park, with a swimming pond that is converted into an ice skating rink in winter and the Carl M. Kuss Memorial baseball field.

The 137-acre Lac Lawrann Conservancy gives West Bend five miles of trails through wetlands and glacial terrain, and a stretch of the roughly 1,000-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail crosses the city at Ridge Run County Park.