Marshfield Central Avenue Historic District

About this property

The Marshfield Central Avenue Historic District is part of the old downtown of Marshfield, Wisconsin. The original wooden downtown burned in a huge fire in 1887. Some of the brick buildings built immediately after the fire still stand, especially near the railroad. Other buildings were added later, and the district includes some off Central, like the old city hall and the depot. Marshfield was a quiet forested area until 1872. In that year, the Wisconsin Central Railroad cleared a path up through the woods to lay rails, choosing a relatively easy spot to cross the low ridge that runs from north of Marshfield to Neillsville—a spot that would become the city of Marshfield. Anticipating the arrival of railroad workers and later commerce, Louis and Frank Rivers built a rough two-room log building that served as a hotel, tavern, and store in a clearing just north of the right-of-way, on the spot that is now the parking lot behind Casa Amigos. This crude structure among the stumps was the first building in what would become Marshfield. The town grew quickly and was platted in 1875, with streets aligned to the railroad rather than the points of the compass. This early prominence of the railroad explains why Central Avenue was laid out running from southwest to northeast. By 1875, the town had 22 wooden buildings. In 1878, William and Charles Upham built the town's first sawmill and a general store. In 1883, Marshfield was incorporated as a city and by 1885, the population was nearly 2000. To his sawmill, Upham added a planing mill, a furniture factory, and a flour and feed mill. Other businesses sprang up selling groceries, ready-made clothes, crockery, jewelry, beer, fresh-baked bread, furniture, and coffins. The main business of the early railroad was transporting lumber from the surrounding forests and from forests to the north. Upham's sawmill cut some of the lumber into boards and shingles. Wood was plentiful, cheap, and quick to build with, so many buildings in the new city were constructed from it. As such, Central Avenue was lined with frame stores with boomtown fronts and wooden cornices. The street itself was unpaved and often muddy or dusty, but wooden boardwalks ran in front of the stores. On June 27, 1887, a fire started in the Upham plant just south of the tracks. The day was hot and windy, and the fire spread into Upham's piles of drying wood. The limited firefighting tools were not enough to suppress the fire, which engulfed Upham's factory complex. The sawmill was fed from a millpond where Miller Park now stands, and even the logs floating there caught fire.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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