Hamburg: A German Trader's Hometown

Hamburg, Iowa was laid out in eighteen fifty-seven by a young German immigrant named Augustus Borchers. He had settled along the Missouri River bottomlands to trade with the local Native communities, and when he platted a town, he named it for his home city in northern Germany.

Fremont County, where Hamburg sits, was established in eighteen forty-seven and takes its name from the explorer John C. Fremont, whose western surveys helped open the region to American settlement. The Missouri River bluffs in this corner of Iowa were part of the old Mormon Trail corridor, and wagon trains bound for Utah passed through before the railroads arrived.

Today Hamburg sits in Iowa's southwestern corner, just north of the Missouri line, a small river town that has held its German immigrant name for nearly one hundred seventy years.