New Post, WI

New Post is a Sawyer County census-designated place on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, with 302 residents in the 2020 census. It lies in the Town of Hunter in northwestern Wisconsin, in a country of lakes, wetlands, forest, and the branching Chippewa River. New Post belongs to an Ojibwe landscape whose communities and travel routes reach beyond one named settlement. The reservation’s history is rooted in the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose territory once extended across a broad region around the present reservation.

Before the 1920s, an Ojibwe community called Pahquawong stood along the west fork of the Chippewa River, about two miles northeast of New Post. Around 1865, Maine-born Thaddeus Thayer started a trading post there and married Mary Anibish, an Ojibwe woman. Thayer’s post became the north terminus of the Chippewa Trail, placing New Post near an older network of Native settlement and overland movement. Today the place’s name carries that layered history: a reservation community beside water and forest, linked to a trading post that grew from an Ojibwe crossroads.