Rib Lake, WI

Rib Lake is a village in Taylor County, Wisconsin, at the junction of Wisconsin 102 and Taylor County D. The 2020 census counted 935 residents. The village is completely surrounded by the Town of Rib Lake, and the lake itself sits inside the village limits. Forest roads lead toward Medford and the rest of Taylor County, while the shore gives the community a geographic center. Rib Lake is a place where the water and the old timber economy occupy the same map.

Kennedy hauled sawmill machinery by oxen from the railroad at Chelsea and built the Rib Lake Lumber Company mill, helping establish the village. In 1891, Fayette Shaw started a tannery that used hemlock bark from the surrounding forests to tan hides shipped from as far away as South America. The mill closed in 1948, and the lake gradually shifted from an industrial dumping ground toward conservation and recreation. Rib Lake still carries both histories: sawdust and tannery bark in the old story, lake protection and forest roads in the present. It is a small Wisconsin village shaped by a lake, a mill, and the hemlock woods.