UW, Eau Claire: Blugolds on the Chippewa

The University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire began, like so many midwestern universities, as a place to train schoolteachers.

The state legislature created the Eau Claire State Normal School in nineteen sixteen. The city donated a twelve-acre site and the school opened with a single building, one hundred fifty-nine students, and twenty faculty members. Harvey Schofield, the institution's first president, guided it through its first twenty-five years. Today that original building bears his name: Schofield Hall.

The school's mission expanded steadily after World War Two. It became Wisconsin State College at Eau Claire in nineteen fifty-one, then Wisconsin State University at Eau Claire in nineteen sixty-four, and finally joined the University of Wisconsin System in nineteen seventy-one as a comprehensive liberal arts university.

The campus sits on a bend of the Chippewa River in the heart of the Chippewa Valley, and the river is a genuine feature of campus life rather than a backdrop. The university has been called Wisconsin's most beautiful campus partly for that reason: red brick buildings and foot trails running along the water in a city that has kept its riverfront accessible.

The alumni list carries a few names worth noting. Justin Vernon, who records under the name Bon Iver, studied here before withdrawing and eventually recording his breakthrough album in a remote Wisconsin cabin during a winter that became the origin story for one of the decade's most celebrated indie folk acts. John Menard Jr., the billionaire founder of the Menards home-improvement chain, graduated from here as well.

Today about nine thousand students are enrolled. The university remains strong in education, nursing, and business, and it sits at the center of Eau Claire's ongoing reinvention as a regional cultural destination in the upper Midwest.