Event Calendar

Prentice Hydraulics had its beginning in 1945 in the Heikkinen Machine Shop near the village of Prentice. Leo Heikkinen repaired and welded heavy equipment, fabricated steel, and manufactured mechanical jammers there. To meet the needs of customers, Leo designed special innovations on their jammers. These improvements attracted attention and soon requests for custom built jammers…

A History of Lumberjacks, Log Drives, and Sawdust Cities in WisconsinFor more than half a century, logging in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and impacted the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen. When the White Pine Was King transports readers back to the lumber boom era and reveals how the…

William Henry Upham arrived in Marshfield in 1878, to establish a sawmill and general merchandise store. In the years that followed, Upham became known to many as Marshfield's most illustrious citizen. His activities as a lumberman are only a small part of his remarkable life story. This presentation will share stories that demonstrate why Upham…

Discover how forestry advocates are collaborating to create the Northwoods Forest History Museum. DNR, Manitowish Waters Historical Society, North Lakeland Discovery Center, Youth Conservation Corps Alumni, and folks who prize our amazing forests are leading the museum project. In this presentation learn about the museum’s design and exhibit spaces including the digital display extensions for…

Ignited by a single match on April 30, 1977, the Five Mile Tower Fire raged out of control for seventeen hours. It would be one of the largest wildland fires in Wisconsin history, ultimately destroying more than 13,000 acres of land and sixty-three buildings. Based on his own experiences during the long battle, plus dozens…

Sometime around 1912, a group of men engaged in a log drive posed for some photographs. One of the resulting pictures has been identified ever since as the "last log drive" on the Wisconsin River. In this program, Ben Clark dives into the history of these photographs, to consider whether it is indeed the "last…

 In 1992, the late Jacques Vallier, a retired high school biology teacher, longtime collector of logging memorabilia, and member of the Forest History Association of Wisconsin donated his collection of logging photographs to the UWSP archives. The collection contains scenes of the interiors and exteriors of camp buildings and sawmills, locomotives, lumberjacks at work and…

The history of Wisconsin logging is not only told in historic photos, documents and oral histories, but also in archaeology, the study of the past through the artifacts and sites left by logging efforts that started in Wisconsin as early as the 1810’s. From early military logging efforts at Prairie du Chien (Fort Crawford), Portage…

The ancient skill of working wrought iron by hand was essential to the development and survival of the Europeans who transformed the American landscape from first explorations through the closing of the frontier in 1893 and well into the mid-twentieth century.  The ubiquitous blacksmith shop had vast variations depending upon the needs of the places…