The Island Woolen Mill: Baraboo's Great Employer
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
On this spot in downtown Baraboo once hummed the largest employer in all of Sauk County. The Island Woolen Mill took its name from a small island created when a water raceway was cut across a bend in the Baraboo River. The first mill rose here in eighteen fifty-nine, and the Island Woolen Mills Company was formally organized a few years later, in eighteen sixty-three.
For more than eighty years its looms carded, spun, and wove wool into clothing, into upholstery for automobiles, and, during the Second World War, into overcoat cloth for American soldiers. By the nineteen twenties it filled the biggest building in the county and ranked among the largest woolen mills anywhere west of Philadelphia. The mill fell silent in nineteen forty-nine, sat empty for years, and was largely destroyed by fire in nineteen sixty-nine.
Only the handsome office wing, finished in nineteen seventeen, survived the flames. In two thousand six the Sauk County Historical Society bought that surviving building from the city for a single dollar. Today it houses the Sauk County History Center, where the story of the mill and the county it once clothed is carefully kept alive.
