Tomah, Wisconsin

Tomah, Wisconsin is named for a Menominee chief who lived a generation before the first white settlers arrived. Chief Tomah, whose English name was Thomas Carron, was a Green Bay trader who became known as a Menominee chief. He was a skilled diplomat who maintained peace between his nation and the American settlers pressing into the Great Lakes.

When founder Robert E. Gillett staked out the town site in eighteen fifty-five, the town took the chief's name, though the story that Tomah once gathered his tribe in this vicinity is unsubstantiated. The railroad soon arrived, and Tomah became a stop on the La Crosse and Milwaukee line.

The town was incorporated as a city in eighteen eighty-three, though its charter was not issued until eighteen ninety-four, and it had eight hundred thirty-seven residents in eighteen seventy. In eighteen ninety-one, construction began on a federally funded residential school for Native American children. The Tomah Indian Industrial School opened in eighteen ninety-three with six Ho-Chunk children and operated until nineteen forty-one.

A report from the Department of the Interior in twenty twenty-four identified two students who died there. Tomah's station is served by Amtrak's Empire Builder, and the city had nine thousand five hundred seventy residents at the twenty twenty census. Today it sits at the junction of Interstate Ninety and Interstate Ninety-Four, calling itself the Gateway to Cranberry Country.