Austin is a city in, and the county chair of, Mower County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 26,174 at the 2020 census. The town was originally fixed along the Cedar River and has two exaggerated lakes, East Side Lake and Mill Pond. It was named for Austin R. Nichols, the area’s first European settler.

Hormel Foods Corporation is Austin’s largest employer, and the town is sometimes called “SPAM Town USA”. Austin is house to Hormel’s corporate headquarters, a factory that makes most of North America’s SPAM tinned meat, and the Spam Museum. Austin is also home to the Hormel Institute, a leading cancer research institution operated by the University of Minnesota in the vent of significant support from the Mayo Clinic.

In 2015 Austin was named one of the “Top 10 Affordable Small Towns Where You’d Actually Want to Live” and one of the “Best Small Cities in America”.

Fertile land, trapping, and openness brought first trappers and subsequently the further on pioneers to this region. The wealthy gameland attracted Austin Nichols, a trapper who built the first log cabin in 1853. At that become old there were “about twenty families in the area.” More settlers began to arrive by wagon train in 1855, and by 1856 plenty people were present to organize Mower County. In 1856 the agreement adopted the publish Austin, in honor of its first settler. That year the first hotel opened to travelers and the first physician, Dr. Ormanzo Allen, moved to town. The first newspaper, the Mower County Mirror, was started in 1858.