Red Cedar River

About

Red Cedar River, Wisconsin — 1856 Knapp Stout & Co, 1860s Menomonie Cedar Falls, 2024 WI DNR Survey 90-mi Dunn County. The Red Cedar runs 34 miles through Barron and Dunn Counties, a Class II river with an optimal flow window of 400 to 1,250 CFS. USGS gauge 05367500 tracks its discharge, which averages 818 CFS. Those numbers describe a working river — one segmented, per the WI DNR 2024 Red Cedar River Survey Report, into three riverine reaches divided by dams. The larger Red Cedar system drains 1,830 square miles across Barron, Dunn, and Chippewa Counties, flowing south and west to its confluence with the Chippewa River, of which it is a tributary.

The river's human record reaches back to the late Paleo-Indians of the 8000 to 6500 BC period, whose evidence of habitation is scattered throughout the Red Cedar Valley. In pre-contact times the river flowed through the ancestral territory of Indigenous peoples, serving as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The 1800s-era treaties, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the allotment era of the 1840s through 1890s established the cession framework that reshaped who held the land.

Then came the timber. The Red Cedar watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding the regional timber industry of 1850 to 1910 and the railroad expansion of the 1860s to 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The defining chapter came in 1856, when Knapp, Stout & Co. used the spot at 22-Mile Ford to cross the river — a crossing now marked by the 22-Mile Ford Park, a 28-acre park in Menomonie. In the 1860s, Cedar Falls, named for falls on the river north of Menomonie where a water-power dam and sawmill were located, took shape and helped define the modern era. Large-scale logging wound down with the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s.

The river's hydrology drew study as the timber faded. USGS survey work of the 1870s to 1890s, gauging-station establishment from the 1880s to 1910s, and state geological survey streamflow assessments of the 1910s to 1930s were the first comprehensive hydrological studies of the Red Cedar. Later, the state water pollution control studies of the 1950s to 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000 confronted more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

Since 2010, the Wisconsin DNR, working with local watershed partnerships, has led the river's recovery. Streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking from 2017 to 2024, nutrient reduction strategy implementation from 2018 to 2024, and water-quality improvements from 2020 to 2024 are the major recent outcomes. Today the river supports the Menomonie, Barron, and Cameron economies. It winds through the Dunnville State Wildlife Area, where bald eagles are frequently sighted gliding above the channel and bottomland forest, and it remains a destination for anglers, well known for a large walleye population that makes it a popular fishing spot across the region. From ancient hunting grounds to lumber-baron crossings to a present-day haven for eagles and fishermen, the Red Cedar carries its full story on the current.