Fenwood, WI USDA Loan

Fenwood is a village in Marathon County, Wisconsin, United States. It is part of the Wausau, Wisconsin Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 152 at the 2010 census.

Fenwood was platted by the railroad in 1891. It was named from woods near the townsite at a fen, or marshy area. A post office was established at Fenwood in 1892, and remained in operation until it was discontinued in 1984.

The village of Fenwood, Marathon Co., Wisconsin was platted by Alfred L. Carey, the attorney for the Milwaukee, Lake Shore & Western Railroad, November 18, 1891, about the time when that railroad struck the place; it was incorporated as a village from part of the town of Wien, April 16, 1904, and its first representative in the county board of Marathon county was W. A. Somers. At the time the railroad struck the place, C. S. Curtis of Wausau erected a large saw mill, which was in operation until 1910, when it ceased sawing. At that time there was a large profitable cheese factory in the village, owned and supplied by farmers in the towns of Wien and Cleveland. John Brinkmann and Emil Szebsdat, under firm name of Brinkmann & Szeljsdat owned a general store, and George Wetterau kept the tavern or hotel in the village. Emil Szebsdat was also the village postmaster.

There was a nice state-graded frame schoolhouse with two “departments”: principal, Vallborg Hermanson, and assistant principal, Miss Gertrude Kurtzweil – an average attendance of forty-five pupils in both departments. There were two German Evangelical Lutheran congregations, holding their services in the schoolhouse and attended by the resident ministers of the town of Wien. https://wiclarkcountyhistory.org/neighbors/marathon/history/1913FenwoodHistory.htm

In 1911, the R. Connor Company of Marshfield, with its
Marathon County mill located at Stratford, set to work clear-
ing two sections of land four miles southeast of the village.
This project, no doubt, had much to do in checking the out-
ward flow of workmen and gave fresh energy to the entire
community. A spur track extending from the mainline to
Connor’s woods provided an easy and rapid means of trans-
porting logs from camp to the mill.
The cut of 1913 climaxed the Connor harvest at this
location and that season, two million feet of logs were decked
at one time at their rollway. For several years more timbers
were hauled into Fenwood from a 500-acre tract. This work
was contracted by John Wetterau and was finished in 1928.
These intermittent and spasmodic shipments marked the ex-
piration of the industry which had given birth to the village.
At one time the Chrouser Saw and Tie Mill was also in
operation in Fenwood. This mill was operated by George
Chrouser from 1908 until the late 1920s. The Fenwood mill
was a branch of the Chrouser mill in Stratford. It consisted
mainly in making ties for the railroad and custom sawing for
area people.
In the early 1900s, Fenwood was a booming lumber
town.
Proof of Fenwood’s past prominence as a lumbering
center is mutely evidenced today by unused and unusable
logging roads. These keep an endless vigil against a time,
never to come, when again one can hear the droning music of
a saw punctuated by staccato notes as steel meets steel, in the
rhythmic swings of lumberjacks, the dying symphony of the
north woods.
(This history of Fenwood was compiled by Lillian Bau-
man using many histories and newspaper articles from area
newspapers.)
Early Fenwood. Photograph on loan from Delbert Wetterau. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/WI/WI-idx?type=turn&id=WI.Fenwood&entity=WI.Fenwood.p0012&isize=text