Tomahawk: Dam, Railroad, and the Paper That Followed the Pine

The city of Tomahawk sits at what loggers and traders once called the Forks of the Wisconsin, where two branches of the river join in the heart of Lincoln County. For decades before any town existed here, crews were floating pine logs down these waters to mills farther south.

Formal settlement came swiftly and deliberately. In eighteen eighty-six William Bradley arrived in connection with the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railroad and organized the Tomahawk Land and Boom Company. The company platted a townsite, began construction of a dam on the Wisconsin River, and started building camps. Logging began in earnest, and sawmills soon followed. By eighteen ninety-one, when Tomahawk incorporated as a city, the town had grown quickly.

That pace could not last. The white pine that made the Northwoods wealthy was finite, and the industry that built Tomahawk began shrinking within a generation. But unlike many cutover towns that emptied out and vanished, Tomahawk found a successor industry before the sawmills went quiet. A paper mill opened during the boom years, and a second, larger mill later opened on the opposite bank of the Wisconsin River. Paper, which needed waterpower and a steady supply of pulpwood, was a natural fit for a place with a dam already built and a river already harnessed.

Three railroads served Tomahawk at its peak , a sign of how much industrial activity converged here at the turn of the twentieth century. The city that grew up around logging survived by shifting to papermaking, and by the time the last big sawmill shut down, the paper industry had already woven itself into the fabric of the town.

The Wisconsin River still runs through Tomahawk. The dam is still there. And the town that William Bradley staked out in a single ambitious year remains one of the most durable mill cities on Route Fifty-One's long run through the Wisconsin interior.