A Capsule of Forest County History

Before the Civil War, Forest County was primarily inhabited by the Chippewa and other Native Americans, and was visited by traveling fur traders and trappers, most of whom were of French descent or mixed French and Indian heritage. 

During the 1860’s, the federal government started construction of what is known as the Military Road. This road connected Green Bay and Fort Wilkins at Copper Harbor on the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula.   Previously, rivers had served as the highways to this section of northeastern Wisconsin.  Military Road made travel through Forest County easier, but marketing of its principal resource, hardwood timber, had to wait for improved markets for hardwood lumber and rail service to transport the lumber.  Unlike the pine that was logged elsewhere, the heavier hardwood logs would not float in the rivers to sawmills downstate.

The Soo Line Railroad bisected Forest County in 1887, and provided rail service to areas adjacent to Argonne, Cavour, and Armstrong Creek, but it was still not profitable to move logs by horse-drawn sleigh for any distance to a railhead.  Eventually, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, lured by land holdings given to them by the government, pushed rail service into the county.  It created a north-south line on the eastern side of the county in the 1890s with a spur into Crandon just after the turn of the century.  Sawmills sprang up like mushrooms after a rain and lumber was shipped to build America’s cities.  By the 1930s, the timber supply waned and the Great Depression shut down most of the big mills.  It was then that residents of what came to be called the “cutover lands” realized the value of the many lakes and miles of streams located in Forest County.  The tourist trade joined logging and saw milling as part of the economic mainstay of the North, and it remains so today.

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