UW-Eau Claire: The Normal School on the Chippewa

The University of Wisconsin Eau Claire sits on bluffs above the Chippewa River, and its origin reflects a Progressive-era conviction that public education could reshape the Midwest.

Eau Claire itself was founded in eighteen fifty-six as a sawmill town at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers, the Eau Claire name coming from the French for clear waters. By the early nineteen hundreds, the timber era was winding down, and civic leaders were looking for an anchor institution. In nineteen sixteen, the state opened the Eau Claire State Normal School, a teachers college, one of a network the University of Wisconsin System was building across the state to supply trained educators for rural communities. Its first building, Schofield Hall, still stands on campus today.

The school evolved through the decades, becoming a four-year liberal arts institution, then a full university within the UW System. Today it enrolls roughly nine thousand students and has produced more than seventy-eight thousand living alumni.

The alumnus who has probably done the most to put Eau Claire on a national cultural map is Justin Vernon, who grew up here, attended UW Eau Claire, and eventually created Bon Iver, the project that began in a remote Wisconsin cabin during a winter of illness and personal crisis and ended with a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in twenty twelve. Vernon has since invested heavily back in his hometown, opening hotels and music venues and co-founding the Eaux Claires Music Festival on the banks of the Chippewa River, drawing artists from across the country back to the valley.

Other notable alumni include John Menard Jr., who built one of the Midwest's largest home improvement chains from a business he launched in the nineteen sixties, and Pamela Matson, who became dean of Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences after a distinguished career in ecology.

The campus today occupies a bend in the river where lumber was once stacked on the banks three stories high. The river is quieter now, and the students walk along it.