Onalaska: The Misplaced Utopia

Onalaska, Wisconsin takes its name from a poem. In eighteen fifty-one, a land developer named Thomas Rowe platted a new Mississippi River town, and according to local legend named it after the Oonalaska of Thomas Campbell's seventeen ninety-nine poem Pleasures of Hope, an idealistic verse about hope and progress. The name was meant to signal ambition: this town, sitting on the floodplain above the river where La Crosse would grow, aspired to something grand.

It was platted in eighteen fifty-one and grew slowly in the shadow of its larger neighbor. Today Onalaska is a city of roughly nineteen thousand people, essentially part of the La Crosse metropolitan area. It still carries the name of a fictional Scottish landscape in a Romantic poem, chosen by a speculator who believed in the power of an evocative name to attract settlers.