Menomonie and the Lumber Empire

The small city of Menomonie on the Red Cedar River was once the headquarters of the largest lumber company in the world, a distinction that is easy to overlook driving through what is now a quiet Wisconsin college town.

The company was Knapp, Stout and Company, founded in eighteen forty-six when John Holly Knapp and William Wilson purchased a share in a sawmill from a man named David Black. Henry Stout bought in seven years later, and the firm took its lasting name. What followed was a systematic conquest of every white pine tree in the Red Cedar River watershed. By eighteen seventy, Knapp, Stout and Company controlled the logging industry across the entire valley. At its peak, the company employed more than two thousand workers and cut an average of eighty-five million board feet of lumber per year between eighteen seventy-one and eighteen ninety-six, more than any other lumber operation on earth.

The company ran its own farms, stores, schools, and even issued scrip that workers spent at company-owned establishments, creating an economic ecosystem that made the town essentially a company city. Logs came down the Red Cedar and were processed at the Menomonie mills before being shipped south toward the Mississippi and on to markets across the country. The company opened offices in Dubuque, Saint Louis, and other river cities as it expanded.

By nineteen hundred, the trees were gone. The Red Cedar watershed had been stripped, the camps closed, and Knapp, Stout and Company dissolved in the early twentieth century. What remained was a town that had to reinvent itself. The result was the Wisconsin State Normal School, founded at Menomonie in nineteen eleven, now the University of Wisconsin Stout, which sits on land that was once part of the Knapp and Stout industrial operation. The lumber empire is gone, but it left behind a college town and a railroad grid built to move timber.