Hudson's First Settler
Near Stillwater, Wisconsin
On this ground in eighteen forty, Louis Massey built a home and became one of the first settlers of what would grow into Hudson, Wisconsin. Massey and Peter Bouchea settled at the mouth of the Willow River, near the present-day corner of First and Saint Croix streets.
The place went by several names before it found the one it kept. First it was Willow River, then Buena Vista, and finally, in eighteen fifty-two, Hudson. In the eighteen fifties and sixties the town boomed as the great pine forests of the Saint Croix Valley opened to logging, and sawmills lined the river.
The marker here remembers one of the men who arrived first.
