Willow River, Minnesota

Willow River grew up at the junction of the Willow and Kettle Rivers in Pine County, a spot the Ojibwe had long used as a gathering place. By March of eighteen seventy-four, when Kettle River Township was organized, the settlement amounted to a railroad depot, a water tank, a woodyard, and two section houses for railroad workers. Like most towns across northern Minnesota at the time, it lived and breathed lumber.

The village plat was formally filed on May eighth, eighteen ninety-one. The old mills are gone, but the rivers still meet here, and the town carries the name of the smaller one.