Sawyer County is a county in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census, its population was 18,074. Its county seat is Hayward. The county is largely rural, with no community outside Hayward exceeding 400 people. It partly overlaps with the reservation of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers the county a high-recreation and high-retirement destination.
Before settlement, the county was covered by virgin timber—home and hunting grounds for Native Americans. During the late 1800s that timber was cut, and the wealth generated started Hayward and the other towns of today. Since then, the area's economy has diversified into farming, then government services and tourism.
History Indians and fur trade The area that is now Sawyer County was contested between the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples in the 18th century as part of the Dakota-Ojibwe War. Oral histories tell that the Ojibwe defeated the Dakota locally in the Battle of the Horse Fly on the upper Chippewa River in the 1790s. By this time, Lac Courte Oreilles had become the site of an Ojibwe village, which explorer Jonathan Carver described after traveling through in 1768: [The village] is situated on each side of the river (which at this place is of no considerable breadth) and lies adjacent to the banks of a small lake. This town contains about forty houses, and can send out upwards of one hundred warriors, many of whom were fine stout young men. The houses of it are built after the Indian manner, and have neat plantations behind them...
Ojibwes allowed trader Michel Cadotte to build a fur-trading post in the area in 1800, with its clerk John Baptist Corbin the first white resident of the future Sawyer county. The United States acquired the region from the Ojibwe Nation in the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters, but the Ojibwe retained the right to hunt and fish on treaty territory. After elements of the U.S. tried to move all Ojibwe west of the Mississippi resulting in the Sandy Lake Tragedy, the Ojibwe people successfully negotiated to establish the permanent Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe.
Charles Belille was the first white settler in what would become Sawyer County. He was a French-speaker from Quebec who around 1830 paddled with a crew of voyageurs up through the Great Lakes to La Pointe. He married an Ojibwe woman named Esther Crane and came south to settle on the Chippewa River near the mouth of the Couderay in the late 1830s. In this wilderness he built a cabin, trapped and traded, and raised a large family. Each spring he and Indian helpers paddled his huge double dugout canoe down to Chippewa Falls to exchange furs for supplies. When U.S. surveyors marked the section corners in 1853, they found Belille logging around his home—the start of small-scale logging.
Large-scale pine logging
Large-scale logging in the area began later. Sawmills in Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire started operating in the 1840s, but it took them a while to work up the Chippewa River to what would become Sawyer County. By 1876 enough lumberjacks were working near modern Ojibwa that the Hall-Raynor Stopping Place had begun offering meals and a place to sleep for them. Loggers were also working the Sawyer County part of the Flambeau River by the 1870s. From both the Chippewa and Flambeau, lumberjacks drove logs on the spring floods to the mills at Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. Knapp, Stout & Co. began logging at Lake Chetac in 1882, floating their logs down the lakes and the Red Cedar River to their sawmill in Menomonie.
In the winter of 1878 lumberman A.J. Hayward walked up the frozen Chippewa River, assessing timber and mill sites. On the Namekagon River below large stands of timber he found a good spot for a dam and millpond, and he probably knew that a railroad was soon to be built through the area. He bought what he could of the mill site and brought in Robert Laird McCormick and the Laird Norton Company as financial backers. The Omaha Railroad laid new tracks up the Namekagon in 1880. Deciding to work with Hayward, the railroad sold him more land that he needed and named the stop for him. Next year, with all the pieces in place, Hayward and his associates formed the North Wisconsin Lumber Company and in 1883 opened their "Big Mill" at Hayward—the sawmill that would drive the economy of that corner of Sawyer County for decades. Logs from the Chippewa and Red Cedar were processed elsewhere, but at Hayward the logs were sawed and planed right there, boards were shipped out, mill jobs were created, and a city grew.
The Ojbwe at Lac Courte Oreilles were pressed for a while to move to live with the Bad River band east of Ashland, but they resisted and in 1872 they surveyed the boundaries of the reservation at Lac Court Oreilles. Their land held valuable stands of virgin pine, and the lumber companies managed to log most of it from 1884 to 1888, paying the Ojibwe only 0.007 of the profits, which historian James Clifton wrote, "must have been one of the best timber bargains of the century."
Booming growth Sawyer County was split out from early Chippewa and Ashland counties in 1883 and organized in 1885, with Hayward its county seat. The county is named for Philetus Sawyer, a lumberman from New England who represented Wisconsin in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate in the 19th century. In 1882 Hayward amounted to a rail siding, water tank, a logging camp, and no more than a dozen structures. By the 1885 census, the little boom-town had grown to 1,069 people, including 357 females, 400 children, and a few elderly. 51% of them were born in the U.S., 33% Scandinavia, 10% Canada, and the remainder from northern Europe. Outside of Hayward but in Sawyer County, 409 families were counted, 252 of them headed by Indians.
Children needed schools. In 1835 a Methodist mission posted three Ojibwe men at Lac Courte Oreilles to teach, but that ended by 1840. In 1877 a rural school was started for the children of Charles Belille's little settlement on the Chippewa. The Bishop school was another rural school, started in 1882 five or ten miles upriver from Belille's. In 1882 a private school was started in A.J. Hayward's upstairs for his two children and later one of R.L. McCormick's. The following fall a public school opened in Hayward in a former billiards hall, with 59 pupils including the Hayward and McCormick children. In 1884 a new school was built in Hayward—a four-room, two-story building. It was used one year, then burned on the first day of classes in 1885. Classes continued in a hall above a store and in the courthouse, while the school was rebuilt. Around 1888 a high school was started in Hayward. As the population grew, schools would continue to expand.
Meanwhile, other institutions were appearing. The Sawyer County Times began print in 1883. McCormick and Frederick Weyerhaeuser founded the Sawyer County Bank in 1884. McCormick was involved in establishing a free library. A kindergarten was added in 1889. By 1898 there were general stores, saloons, blacksmith, harness shop, hotels, ice houses, feed mill, a sausage factory, barber, millinery shop, a town hall, and several churches. In the 1900 census, 1864 people were counted in the village of Hayward, 873 on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, and 856 elsewhere in the county.
End of logging and what followed White and red pine were the most desirable lumber, good for building and floating down a stream. The last significant amounts in Sawyer County were cut from 1899 to 1905 southwest of Radisson in the Meteor Hills. Since they were far from driveable streams, the logs were hauled out on a temporary logging railroad to the Chippewa River, then floated to the mills downstream. As the choice pine dwindled, loggers and sawmills shifted to less desirable pine and hardwoods. In 1902 North Wisconsin Lumber sold its Big Mill in Hayward to Edward Hines Lumber Company. The mill was renamed North Wisconsin Lumber & Mfg. Co. and continued sawing. It finally burned in 1922. That was not the end of logging. Smaller operators have continued logging and sawing lumber in the area ever since.
The earliest settlers farmed on a small scale, starting with Charles Belille, who cleared a little forest around his cabin to grow potatoes and some vegetables. When logging began, he expanded his clearing to sell the camps vegetables and hay, and he hired Indians to work his fields. After land was logged, settlers bought some of the resulting cutover forties and started scratching out small farms, grazing a few animals, planting some crops among the stumps and brush, and working in the logging camps in winter. The UW College of Agriculture in 1896 began promoting the northern cutover as good farmlands for settlers, touting the good soils and advising on various crops. Some settlers simply bought a cheap, unimproved forty or eighty from a lumber company or from the county after the lumber company let its land go tax-delinquent. Others, after 1917, paid more for a "made-to-order farm" at Meadowbrook or Ojibwa from Benjamin Faast's Wisconsin Colonization Company, which sold the start of a new farm as a package aimed at immigrants and city folks: a prebuilt farmhouse ("an attractive cottage painted a cheerful color,") a barn, a cow, two pigs, some tools, and possibly a few acres of land already cleared of stumps. Anticipating isolation as a problem for these new farmers, Faast's company even promised community in the planned town of Ojibwa. Some of the farms succeeded, but many faltered in the face of stumps, thin soils, limited markets, and a short growing season. By 1929 the UW was no longer promoting new farms in the northland, and Faasts's Colonization Company went bankrupt.
Indians were present through all of this of course, working as loggers, driving logs, working in the sawmills. Some integrated into Western society and some did not. The lack of integration was considered a problem by many. By the late 1800s the U.S. government was trying to address the "Indian problem" with boarding schools which aimed to make Indian children into farmers and factory workers and Christians. With good intentions, R.L. McCormick, head of the Hayward mill, argued for this, and a boarding school was established at Hayward in 1901. Most of its students came from the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation ten miles away, but others came from farther around Wisconsin and Minnesota. The students were forbidden to speak Ojibwe and had little contact with their families, so they were cut off from Ojibwe culture. The school was short on teachers and the children spent only half the school-day in classes so they could work in the school farm and kitchen the rest of the day. And it was crowded and unsanitary, so there was much more sickness than in the general population. The boarding school closed in 1934.
The Flambeau Flowage was created in 1923 when Northern States Power Company built the hydroelectric dam near Winter. It generated electricity and recreation opportunities, but it also flooded 6,000 acres upstream in the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, submerging Indian homes, graves and wild rice beds. The new flowage submerged the village of Post, and NSP moved it to New Post, but the power company reneged on agreements to stock fish in the new flowage, to replant wild rice, to move some homes, and to move 700 graves. When the initial 50-year-license ended in the 1970s, the Ojibwe and the American Indian Movement took over the dam and ended up wresting some control back from NSP.