Schofield, WI

Schofield is a Marathon County city of 2,157 people at the 2020 census, just south of Wausau along the eastern shore of Lake Wausau. The city name honors William Scholfield, who came to the area in 1851 to open a sawmill; somewhere along the way, the spelling dropped its "l". That lumber beginning still fits the setting, where the Wisconsin River, the Eau Claire River, and working waterfronts shape the city's edges.

Lake Wausau is an 1,851-acre impoundment of the Wisconsin River, and the Eau Claire River widens into the Eau Claire Flowage before meeting it at Schofield. River access, canoeing, kayaking, open fields, trails, and neighborhood parks fill in the present-day map. Schofield sits inside the Wausau metro, but its own map is easy to recognize: water on the west, the flowage to the north and east, and a compact city woven into the larger paper-and-timber region. The local scoop is a river city whose boundaries are defined more by water and old mill geography than by a grand main street.