The ingredients for the making of Sawyer County

Beaver pelts, white pine, and summer resorts – in that order – have for well over two centuries been the key elements in the history of Sawyer County.

The French Canadian names of those white settlers who came first are still present here today: Cadotte, Corbin, Belille, LaRonge, Trepanier….

The first white men came for the beaver pelts, so much in demand for American and European hat-making, and so abundantly supplied in the headwaters country of the Chippewa, the Namekagon, and the Totagatic rivers.

They established posts for the fur companies where they traded supplies with the Chippewas for the prized beaver pelts. The first trading post, Cadotte’s, was three miles south of present-day Hayward on the banks of the Namekagon River which flows parallel to Hwy. 63.

In 1800 John Corbin (spelled Corbine today) re-opened this post on the shores of Lac Courte Oreilles near the central village of the Chippewa Indians. The name is French for ‘lake of short ears,’ a reference either to the Chippewa’s possible custom of shortening the ears of prisoners or, less grimly, a description of their own ears which they chose not to elongate through mutilation as some other tribes did.

Corbin married a Chippewa woman, introduced his Indian neighbors (the sole inhabitants of the 5000 acre lake at that time) to Catholicism, fathered ten children and died in 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War, when the cities of the Midwest were eager to resume their expansion and growth.

Timber was an essential element to that growth and lumber barrons were anxious to supply the demand for building materials. They were pushing men up the rivers of Wisconsin to harvest the accessible timber and cruise ever northward for more. Not far behind were the settlers and adventurers eager for cheap land in the Northwoods wilderness.

This push north hit what is now known as Sawyer County around the late 1870’s. The North Wisconsin Lumber Company was one of the many hungry enterprises that recognized the potential in the vast stands of white pine here – untold millions of board feet worth millions of dollars even then – and was headed by A. J. Hayward. Soon lumber camps sprung up wherever there was a stand of pine to cut.

The settlement that developed around Hayward’s logging and lumber mill operation officially became the city of Hayward in 1881. Sawyer County was formed from parts of Ashland and Chippewa Counties two years later with Hayward as its county seat.

Soon the railroad lines became active enabling the lumber business to boom and offering transportation to the fledgling summer resorts which were just beginning to peer hopefully into the 20th century.

When the area’s vast timber finally ran out around 1900, ("a despoilment of natural resources hardly paralleled in history!") there was yet another abundant resource that would determine the future of Sawyer County.

Though the beautiful white pine forests were now gone there still remained over 200 pristine lakes upon the shores of which were already nestled a few of the summer resorts, private clubs, rustic cabins and idyllic fishing camps that would lay the groundwork for a recreation and tourism industry that would carry Sawyer County into the next millenium.