The Village of Hawarden can no longer be referred to as the little town where you locate houses by their description. Residents have now received house numbers.

Barb Martin, Village of Hawarden clerk, said the 40 occupied buildings in the village as well as the vacant lots received numbers a month ago. She said this was done after emergency personnel requested the village office institute the numerical addresses.

“The reason that we’re all having to do it is because emergency services want us to have house numbers, they want all of our little communities to have house numbers, because (without them) it just makes it impossible for them to find places,” said Martin. “You can’t just tell an ambulance come to the second house on the northwest corner of town.”

Martin said emergency personnel used to find the right house through people going out and parking at the highway, so they could lead the ambulance to the right building. She said that makes it important to have the house numbers, but it was also fun to be a bit different.

“I thought it was kind of nice and sort of quirky,” she said. “Some people had assigned themselves numbers. One street had two number 19s on it and stuff like that, which is pretty quirky. But now we have actual numerical order numbers and everybody has their own.”

To get residences their proper numbers Martin took a map of the village and put numbers on it before members of council drove around to make sure the right houses had the right numbers. She said sometimes it was a little hard to tell because there would be several lots belonging to one person, but they did their best to make sure everything is correct.

Martin said the village office then assigned residents a number and each household was responsible for putting up their own number. Despite not being different anymore, she said it is a good change for many different reasons.

“The satellite dish people and everything like that, they want a physical address and they didn’t seem to want lot and block numbers, which is why people started making themselves up numbers (before),” she said. “You also have to have a number for your driver’s licence. I personally had taken my lot and block number and just put them together (for my licence).”

The change to numerical addresses is also good because when couriers come into town they had a hard time finding the right people, said Martin.

“It’s not like the town is that huge, but still it makes it a little more difficult. Modern times intrude on all of us.”