Most shelterbelts date to the 1930s, but one Northwoods farmer recognized their benefits long before that.

The Northwoods has produced many remarkable people. While many thrive in northern Wisconsin and never want to live anyplace else, others must leave to reach their full potential. Winifred Dunn is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary women ever to come out of the Northwoods.

The black bear is a living symbol of Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Summer visitors thrill at seeing one, and hunters look forward to the opportunity to take part in a seasonal bear hunt. Black bears are important to the Northwoods, but in the not-so-distant past they were seen as more of a nuisance with hunters taking unlimited numbers.

In the United States, the first great ventriloquist was Harry E. Lester, and Lester considered the Northwoods to be his home.

Railroad accidents were common in the late nineteenth century. Because safety was an issue, some train robbers in the Northwoods thought they could use it to their advantage.

The Wisconsin River is a tamed river, but in the past, before the dams, the river ran wild, and loggers found Grandfather Falls near Merrill to be a difficult obstacle to overcome.

Matthew Stapleton was head of one of Rhinelander’s oldest and most distinguished families. Stapleton settled in Rhinelander in 1883 and worked as an overseer of the Brown Brothers’ boom operation. In 1904 he was elected mayor of Rhinelander and later went on to serve as postmaster. Despite all that, it was his daughter Beatrice who made history during World War II.

Organized labor’s campaign for a ten-hour workday gained momentum in the 1870s and 1880s. The often-violent response to union demands in places like Chicago and Milwaukee served to make the public more open to union ideas. The Northwoods was slow to accept the inevitable, but by 1892 the push for a ten-hour workday hit Rhinelander.

Ole Catfish and his family led quiet, unassuming lives in their home at Lac du Flambeau. They were not remarkable in any way and not the type of people whose names one would expect to find splashed across national newspapers. Yet that is exactly what happened in 1934 when Catfish’s life intersected with that of one of America’s most notorious gangsters. Historian Gary Entz has more:

Charles Sanders was a carpenter who relocated to Lake Tomahawk in 1888 to help construct the station building for the Milwaukee Line. Sanders paid $125 dollars for a plot of land and became proprietor of the Two Jacks Resort, which was the second resort property developed in the Lake Tomahawk area. The Two Jack’s Resort had six cottages and served guests for nearly sixty years. By 1945, however, the resort was considered primitive, run down, and well past its prime.