Park Falls, WI

Park Falls is a Price County city along the North Fork of the Flambeau River, in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Ojibwe people used the river and surrounding woods long before the lumber era; in the late 19th century, Henry Sherry’s sawmill and pulp works turned the falls into a rail-and-mill settlement. The place began as Muskellunge Falls, took the Park Falls name after the post office opened in 1889, became a village in 1901, and a city in 1912. The Flambeau Paper Company carried that forest-products story into the 20th century, with the paper mill closing in 2006. The older industrial map still shows why the river runs through the middle of town.

Today the river links work, recreation, and local tradition. The city’s Highway 13 and downtown improvement work includes murals depicting former businesses, while the Chamber’s calendar keeps Flambeau Rama and the Tour de Flambeau bike race in the yearly mix. Fishing and paddling remain practical ways of encountering the North Fork, while the city’s signs and murals carry the river story into town. Park Falls also sits inside the Chequamegon School District, created when Park Falls and Glidden combined school systems for the 2009–10 year. It is a small city whose identity is unusually legible: a river crossing, a forest-products past, and a town center still telling its own story.