Price County was created in 1879 from parts of Chippewa and Lincoln counties, and for its first century its story was written in white pine.
The county was named for William T. Price, a lumber baron and U.S. Congressman whose timber holdings benefited directly from opening the region to logging. The vast white pine forests — trees four to six feet in diameter at the base — were worth more than any mineral in the ground, and the “green gold” era drew loggers, railroad men, and settlers into the Northwoods.
Logging camps housing 50 to 200 men dotted the Flambeau River watershed, working mainly in winter when frozen ground made it easier to skid logs. Spring thaw meant river drives, when thousands of logs were floated downstream to mills in Phillips and Park Falls. The county's population tells the story: 9,106 in 1900, surging to 11,132 by 1910 at the peak of the harvest, and nearly flat by 1920 once the accessible old-growth pine was gone.
One survivor of that era is the Round Lake Logging Dam, 18 miles east of Fifield on the South Fork of the Flambeau River where it flows out of Round Lake. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is the only known surviving logging dam in northern Wisconsin. Loggers built it between 1878 and 1886 to impound water for the drives: they built up a head of water behind the dam, then released it all at once to flush the logs downstream. The U.S. Forest Service, the Price County Historical Society, and the Friends of the Round Lake Logging Dam rebuilt the structure between 1992 and 1995. It is publicly accessible today within the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest.
By the 1920s the forests had been largely clear-cut. What had been endless white pine became a landscape of stumps, bare hills, and tax-delinquent land. Farmers tried to work the sandy, nutrient-poor soils left behind, and most failed; fires swept through the dried slash the loggers had left. The federal government stepped in, and in 1933 the Chequamegon National Forest was established on thousands of acres of cut-over and tax-forfeited land. Civilian Conservation Corps crews planted millions of red pine, jack pine, and spruce seedlings through the 1930s and 1940s.
Today the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest covers more than 1.5 million acres. Much of it is second growth that only partly resembles the original wilderness, but it supports the recreation and timber economy the county still depends on. The Fifield Fire Lookout Tower, built in 1932 and listed on the National Register in 2007, and the Price County Historical Society Museum in the old Fifield Town Hall — itself on the National Register since 1978 — keep that story in view.
The North Fork Flambeau River and South Fork Flambeau River still carry the names the loggers gave them, and the forests that grew back are the same public land that draws paddlers, hunters, and hikers north today. The county that was named for a lumberman now earns its living in part from the woods he helped clear.
Source: Price County Fun.