MARINETTE COUNTY HISTORY
The first recorded inhabitants of the Menominee River Basin were a small Algonquin tribe known as "the wild rice people." Journals of seventeenth and early eighteenth century explorers describe a tribe of forty to eighty men living in a single village at the mouth of the Menominee River. By the early 1820s, the Menominee numbered about 500 men, and were scattered throughout a dozen villages in Wisconsin. Between 1670 and the early 1800s, various explorers, fur traders and missionaries visited the area as they passed by on the water routes of Green Bay and the Menominee River. The first known white settler on the Menominee River was Stanislaus Chappu, or Chappee, a French-Canadian fur trader who operated a log trading post at the site of Marinette between 1794 and 1824. Another fur trader, William Farnsworth, arrived at the Menominee River Basin in 1822. Two years later he usurped Chappee's position as the area's fur trader as he forcibly ejected Chappee from his trading post with the help of nearby Chippewa Indians. Farnsworth and his Native American common law-wife, "Queen" Marinette,
after whom the city is said to have taken its name, operated the trading
business from the log post for several years. Farnsworth's companion, who
was sometimes referred to as Queen Marinette, acquired considerable skill in
managing the fur trading business. Marinette became virtually solely
responsible for the business, as Farnsworth began to devote time to other
pursuits. Farnsworth associated with Charles Brush in a business venture,
which marked the beginning of a new industry that would dominate the
Menominee River Basin for the next fifty years. In 1832, the partners
erected a water-powered sawmill at the foot of today's North Raymond Street. Marinette County, created in 1879 from Oconto County, is named after
"Queen" Marinette, a 19th Century trading post owner who was the daughter of
a Menominee princess and a French-Canadian trapper. Located in northeast
Wisconsin, the county seat is Marinette. As the lumber boom period began to fade, the once prosperous sawmills began to close, and most of the sawmill related buildings were either razed, dismantled and moved or burned in fires and not replaced. The last Menominee River log drive occurred in 1917, and the last lumber company sawmill closed down in 1931.
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