Mosinee: Little Bull Falls and the Birth of Wisconsin Paper

Before it was Mosinee, this town was Little Bull Falls , named for the roaring rapids on the Wisconsin River where the water dropped sharply enough to power a saw. French fur traders moved through this stretch as early as the seventeen nineties. In eighteen thirty-six a settler named John Moore built the first sawmill at the falls, and the lumber industry that would define central Wisconsin for the next half-century began.

The town was formally renamed in eighteen fifty-seven, taking its name from a Chippewa leader whose name translated roughly as Moose Tail. By the height of the lumber era, the mill at Little Bull Falls was running eight saws and cutting six million board feet of lumber a year.

But the pines ran out, and Mosinee had to find another identity. The answer came from the same river that had powered the sawmills. Papermaking needs a reliable flow of clean water, and the Wisconsin River provided exactly that. In nineteen eleven a paper company established a new mill here, designed by a Norwegian engineer named Olai Bache-Wiig using the sulfate process to make Kraft wrapping paper. The company that would eventually be known as Mosinee Paper grew steadily, and by nineteen twenty-eight had expanded into custom production runs.

The transformation was dramatic: in nineteen ten, before the paper mill was well established, the village had four hundred eighty-two residents. By nineteen twenty , just one decade into the paper era , the population had more than doubled to eleven hundred sixty-one. An entire town rebuilt itself around a single industry in the span of a generation.

Mosinee's story is a version of the story told all along Route Fifty-One through central Wisconsin: the logging boom that stripped the forests, the brief vacancy when the trees were gone, and then the pivot to paper , a second industry that used the same rivers the loggers had used, and lasted far longer than the pine ever could.