Pewaukee, Wisconsin

Pewaukee takes its name from an Algonquian word often translated as lake of shells, and by eighteen seventeen white traders were already visiting the lake to exchange goods with the Potawatomi, Menominee, Sauk, and Ho-Chunk people who camped and fished here. European settlement began in eighteen thirty-five when Isaac Judson and Elon Fuller arrived. The clear, cold spring-fed lake that gives the town its name turned out to be ideal for ice harvesting, and before mechanical refrigeration, cutting and shipping lake ice was one of the area's main industries.

The township organized in eighteen forty, the village incorporated in eighteen seventy-six, and a new city incorporating land from the surrounding township was established in nineteen ninety-nine. Pewaukee today is a western suburb of Milwaukee, about twenty miles out, but the lake still shapes the town's identity.