Sparta: Bicycle Capital of America

Sparta, Wisconsin, is a small Monroe County city that carries a large title: the Bicycle Capital of America. The designation dates to nineteen ninety, and it is not arbitrary. Sparta sits at the junction of two of the oldest rail-trail conversions in the country.

The Elroy-Sparta State Trail, opened in nineteen sixty-seven, was one of the first abandoned railroad beds in the United States converted into a recreational trail. The La Crosse River State Trail picks up nearby, running twenty-two miles along a former Chicago and Northwestern Railroad corridor to La Crosse. The settlement here was named by the mother of its first settlers after the ancient Greek city-state, though the Sparta of Monroe County is rather more hospitable than its namesake.

The original settlers were Ho-Chunk people, who had held this land until treaty cessions in eighteen thirty-seven. Today Sparta draws cyclists from across the Midwest who come to ride trails that pass through tunnels blasted for trains that stopped running generations ago.