Hesper was the site of one of the oldest Society of Friends congregations in Iowa, organized in 1855. Its first meeting house was built in 1856. A frame church erected on this site in 1879 was destroyed by fire on Oct. 22, 1904, and the present church was built in 1905. The first Winneshiek County Fair was held in September 1873 on a site one block north of the Main Street intersection. The boyhood home of author Hamlin Garland, who lived there from 1868 to 1870 and wrote “Son of the Middle Border,” was located two miles west.