Rice Lake is a city in Barron County, Wisconsin, located on the shore of a lake with the same name. The question is, what is the story behind Rice Lake’s namesake?

From 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. on April 10, a group gathered at the Blue Hills Lecture Hall at UW-Eau Claire – Barron County to attend Nicole Muschinske’s presentation on the creation and history of Rice Lake titled “What’s in a Name?”

The event was part of the “Thursdays at the U” series partially funded by the UW-Barron County Foundation. The series involves weekly lectures open to the public each Thursday.

Linda Tollefsrud, the series organizer, introduced Muschinske before the presentation began.

“Maybe some of you are wondering why it’s called Rice Lake if there’s no rice in it,” Tollefsrud said.

Muschinske said she is currently the program coordinator for GrassWorks, an organization that promotes managed grazing and other regenerative agriculture practices. In December 2023, she received her masters degree in science at UW-Madison, where she originally worked on this project. 

“This has turned a little bit into my passion project, and continuing to tell the story and really hear from people who live in Rice Lake about their interest in history,” Muschinske said.

Muschinske said she grew up visiting Rice Lake since she had family in the area and currently lives nearby. She eventually found an interest in the names she saw associated with the Rice Lake’s logging and lumbering history.

“In the environmental history field, there’s kind of this idea of ‘scouting the terrain,’” Muschinske said. “Going out and looking and seeing what you can find and letting that guide your research into the history of the land.”

Muschinske provided a brief timeline of the area’s history from her research. From about 1830 to 1850, the land now known as Rice Lake was surveyed and mapped. The “Pine Tree Treaty” of 1837 secured about 10 million acres of land and natural resources.

During this period of surveyance, settlers realized how much wild rice was in the area. According to Muschinske, the habitat was ideal for wild rice since the lake was only around 4 or 5 feet deep at the time. This is an annual plant that requires harvesting.

Muschinske said the cultural significance of wild rice, or manoomin, to the Ojibwe people living there cannot be understated. The Anishinaabe migration story led to “food that grows on water” and goes beyond just subsistence.

“Noting this important, eternal relationship between Ojibwe people and wild rice, that’s something that is central to this story of Rice Lake, of logging and understanding the different people that live on this landscape today as well,” Muschinske said.

Muschinske said the “Pine Tree Treaty” laid the foundation for the success of a lumber company later known as Knapp, Stout & Co., which was initially formed in 1846 and began to explore logging in 1858.

In order to utilize the existing lake for logging, the firm decided to build a dam in 1864. They dammed the Red Cedar River at the mouth of the lake and raised the water level, which allowed the logs to be kept over winter. The dam would open in spring and the logs went downstream to the saw mills.

According to Muschinske, this act eventually destroyed the wild rice habitat, taking away a major food source from the Ojibwe people. Today, Rice Lake’s maximum depth is 19 feet.

Despite the lack of rice, the city of Rice Lake began its settlement in 1868. Muschinske said in 1873, Knapp, Stout & Co. owned 115,000 acres of pine lands on the Chippewa and Menomonie Rivers, giving them the title of the largest lumber company in the world.

Muschinske said that in order to access even more land, county members called for the removal of Ojibwe people to the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in 1878. This forced removal was made even more possible due to the loss of rice.

Although no record of this treaty exists today, Muschinske found a published article in the Rice Lake Chronotype where a man named H.W. Drake states that Knapp, Stout & Co. sent a large amount of supplies to “replace the rice upon which the Indians had depended.”

“Knapp-Stout Co. doesn’t have a technical legal right to be creating a treaty with a tribe because they’re not a federal entity,” Muschinske said. “Was it officially a treaty? Was it just a word that was used to make it easier to talk about?”

Muschinske said that 1891 marked the end of the Knapp, Stout & Co. era, and by 1897, the forests were “practically gone.”

Near the end of her presentation, Muschinske emphasized the importance of cultural acknowledgement. She mentioned the sculpture titled “Manoomin: Food that Grows in Water” created by Sara Balbin and located on Lakeshore Drive in Rice Lake.

“Looking at the different people that have and continue to live on this landscape, understanding how we can share this landscape, is very important,” Muschinske said.

Matczak can be reached at [email protected].