Winneconne: Place of Skulls on the Wolf River

The village of Winneconne sits on both banks of the Wolf River in Winnebago County, Wisconsin, where the river meets the chain of lakes that connects to Lake Winnebago. The name has many spellings and meanings. Early records give it as land of dirty water, and also as land of skull and bones, a reading tied to an old burial mound near the river that the French called Butte des Morts.

The Wolf River chain, the Wolf Chain, as it is called locally, made this location strategically and economically significant long before American settlement began. The river and the connected lakes formed a natural highway through the interior of Wisconsin, and the Ho-Chunk people had traveled and fished here for generations. When European traders arrived, they followed the same water routes.

American settlement came in the late eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and the village grew into a small milling and fishing community. Today Winneconne is perhaps best known for a piece of civic theater: in nineteen sixty-seven, after being left off an official Wisconsin highway map, the village declared itself an independent republic and issued a tongue-in-cheek threat to secede from the state. The governor of Wisconsin met with village officials, and Winneconne rejoined the state.

The Wolf River still moves through town, clear and cold, past a village that knows its own name means something the tourist brochures leave out.