Fall Creek, WI

At the 2020 census, Fall Creek was an Eau Claire County village of 1,422 people bordered by the Town of Lincoln. The village was founded in 1870 beside the rapids that gave Fall Creek its name. Its first post office opened that year under a different name, Cousins, honoring Eau Claire businessman Henry Cousins; by July 1874, the post office and community had become Fall Creek. That little rename tells you a lot about the place: water supplied the name, while regional business connections supplied the first mail-era identity.

Fall Creek now sits within the Eau Claire area but keeps its own village scale. Lincoln Avenue and the local roads carry the everyday traffic, and Fall Creek High School is one of the community's main landmarks. Older buildings and the fire station sit alongside parks, ballfields, and the creek country that gave the place its name. Nothing about the map is accidental: a set of rapids, a post office, and a road network turned a small Eau Claire County settlement into a village that still feels tied to the water just outside its streets.