Event Calendar

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…

In 2021, a 1,200 year old canoe was discovered in Madison’s Lake Mendota. Selected as one of the top ten archaeological discoveries in the world for 2021, its recovery made worldwide news. In the fall of 2022, a 3,000 year old canoe was found in the same location. It is the oldest canoe in the…

Along with much of the State of Wisconsin at the turn of the 19th Century, Southwestern Marathon and Northeastern Clark Counties relied on the lumber industry to support the local economy. Cutting the standing timber, loading and hauling the fallen logs, and sawing them into lumber at mills were all common scenes. In this presentation…

In the last half of the 1800s entrepreneurs and businessmen constructed dozens of privately-funded “bridge piers” along the western shores of Lake Michigan. At these piers, Wisconsin’s forests were exchanged for manufac-tured goods and new settlers. The piers and their associated general stores and lumber mills became seeds around which busy shipping hubs, villages, and…