Saronville is a village in Clay County, and its origins are Swedish. Homesteaders from Sweden reached this part of the county in 1869 and 1870 and built a combined church and school building south of Huxley. Their congregation took the name Saron Evangelical Lutheran, reported to be for a village in Sweden, and the town in turn took its name from the church. Congregation records survive from 1872 onward, with the constitution and part of the early minutes written in Swedish.
The town was established in 1882, after the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad agreed to place a station here; the congregation’s pastor led the negotiations. A post office opened that October. Around 1900 the village had close to two hundred residents, more than twenty businesses and eight passenger trains a day, and it was known locally as the white city, or the windmill town, for its painted houses and their individual windmills.
Almost none of that survives. After the Second World War, houses were moved out of Saronville to answer housing shortages elsewhere. The 2020 census counted 35 residents in a village of about a tenth of a square mile. In recent decades the place has kept a post office, a grain terminal and one active church, set in flat farm country between Sutton and Clay Center.
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Saronville is a small Clay County village founded in 1882 by Swedish immigrant settlers, who named it after Saron, a village in Sweden.
Like several of Clay County's smaller communities, Saronville's population has declined steadily from its early-20th-century peak, though it remains an active, named community today.