Cloverland, Wisconsin - History was all around me

I grew up in Cloverland, Wisconsin. I looked at it as the place settled by my grandparents and their friends in the 1920s, but it was more than that. History was all around me.

When we walked behind my father’s stone-boat clearing the fields of sticks and stones, we found arrowheads, logging saws, chains, railroad spikes, tree roots…all left by those who came before us.

The arrowheads and knives were found on our farm in Cloverland, Wisconsin.  Cloverland is located in the northeast corner of Douglas County. 

 

Cloverland, Wisconsin, is the site of many centuries of human history. Whenever we visit the Brule River, Lake Superior’s shore, hike in the Brule River State Forest, or drive down Highway 13 from Superior, Wisconsin, to Port Wing or Bayfield, we share the space once occupied by the ancient Indians, Sioux, and Ojibwe, fur traders, lumbermen, speculators, miners, homesteaders, and immigrant farmers of the cut-over land.

The Brule River[i] that flows north through Cloverland was once an important water route connecting Lake Superior via a portage to Upper Lake St. Croix,  the St. Croix River, and then south down the  Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.

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[i] The Brule River is also known as the Bois Brule River.