Tunnel City, Wisconsin

Tunnel City owes its entire existence to a hole in a hill. The La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad bored the first tunnel here in eighteen fifty-eight, completing the last gap in its rail route from Milwaukee to La Crosse. The station was simply called Tunnel.

The bore was improved in eighteen sixty-one, and a second tunnel directly to the north was cut in eighteen seventy-four. That second tunnel is still in use today under Canadian Pacific ownership. The small community that grew around the station took the name Tunnel City, a rare case of a town named not for a founder or a distant homeland, but for a feat of nineteenth-century engineering.