Park Ridge, WI

Park Ridge is a 143-acre village completely surrounded by Stevens Point in Portage County. It incorporated in 1938 as a small residential municipality with a commercial district, five-member board, and village hall on Crestwood Drive. The village’s shape is the story: it is its own unit of government, but the city is on every side.

Early leaders were trying to solve everyday problems—school arrangements, zoning, roads, fire protection, and services for a growing group of homes. A volunteer fire department formed in the 1940s after a house fire exposed the limits of relying on Stevens Point across the city line; sanitary sewers arrived in 1957. Park Ridge has no park inside its own boundaries, but Stevens Point’s Iverson Park sits nearby, and the village’s streets feed directly into the surrounding urban area. The local scoop is a tiny municipality that grew alongside Stevens Point, keeping its own board, utilities, and history while living inside the city’s larger map. Its boundaries are small, but its civic history is unusually specific.