Wausau: Big Bull Falls and the Insurance That Came After the Logs

Route Fifty-One runs straight through the heart of Wausau, the county seat of Marathon County and one of the more interesting industrial cities in the Wisconsin interior. The settlement that became Wausau began in eighteen thirty-nine when an entrepreneur named George Stevens arrived on the Wisconsin River, drawn by timber. The place was called Big Bull Falls for the powerful cascade that echoed off the river bluffs. In eighteen fifty the name changed to the Ojibwe word Wausau, meaning a far-away place, or a place that can be seen from far away.

For decades Wausau ran on white pine. The Wisconsin River floated logs south, and the mills converted them to lumber as fast as the forests could supply them. By the eighteen eighties the city also had a brewery , the largest in northern Wisconsin , and the red granite quarried from nearby Rib Mountain was beginning to find its way into buildings across the region. Rib Mountain's quartzite, opened in eighteen ninety-three, was so hard and resistant that companies including the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company , later known as Three M , mined it for sandpaper abrasives well into the twentieth century.

But the detail that most distinguishes Wausau from other Wisconsin mill cities is what happened in nineteen eleven. Wisconsin had just passed the nation's first constitutionally valid workers' compensation law, and a group of Wausau businessmen , primarily lumbermen who understood workplace injury all too well , decided to organize a mutual insurance company to serve it. Employers Mutual Liability Insurance Company of Wisconsin issued its very first policy on September first, nineteen eleven, to the Wausau Sulfite Fibre Company down in Mosinee. It was the first workers' compensation policy ever written in the United States.

The company, later known as Employers Insurance of Wausau, grew into a major national insurer and set workplace safety standards that became models across the country. Wausau had built its first fortune on logging. It built its second on protecting the workers who did the logging , a rather extraordinary pivot for a nineteenth-century mill town.