Brokaw: The Company Town That Dissolved Itself

The community of Brokaw, just off Route Fifty-One along the Wisconsin River, spent more than a century as a company town built around a single paper mill , and then, when the mill closed, dissolved itself entirely.

Construction on the mill began in July eighteen ninety-nine, and when it opened in nineteen oh one it was the largest paper mill in Wisconsin. Because of the mill's isolated location, the Wausau Paper Company built a village to house its workers, and Brokaw incorporated in nineteen oh three. For over a hundred years the mill and the village breathed together.

In the spring of twenty twelve the mill closed, eliminating four hundred fifty jobs and leaving Brokaw essentially bankrupt, saddled with three million dollars in debt it had no way to service. On October first, twenty eighteen, the village officially dissolved, merging into the neighboring Village of Maine , becoming one of the few incorporated American communities to simply cease to exist after its economic reason for being disappeared.