The Columbia County courthouse on March 12, 2016
Columbia County was created in 1846 from land that had been part of Portage County. It is named after Christopher Columbus, the Italian navigator and explorer who in 1492 sailed the ocean blue and is credited with discovering the New World. The city of Portage is the county seat. It may seem more appropriate for the city of Columbus to be the county seat, but no, it’s Portage. The city of Portage really has nothing to do with the current Portage County which lies farther north and is not even adjacent to Columbia County. I blame the territorial legislature for this: until 1846 the city of Portage was in Portage County and it should have stayed in Portage County, except that when the legislature sliced things up on the map, they gave the wrong names to two of the counties. Well, that’s my opinion anyway.
Portage got its name from the French word (“portage”) used to describe carrying small boats overland between two bodies of water. Portage lies between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, and so by making a relatively short (under two mile) portage between the two rivers, one can pass from the Fox River to the Wisconsin River. The Fox River connects to Lake Michigan and the Wisconsin River is a tributary of the Mississippi River which eventually flows in the Gulf of Mexico.
Marquette and Joliet passed through “le portage” in 1673 on their way to discover the Mississippi River. The area was a key link for fur traders, and eventually trading posts were built in the 1780s. In 1828 the federal government built Fort Winnebago at the Fox River end of the portage, and the small settlement that grew up around the fort was incorporated as Portage City in 1854 after having become the county seat in 1851. A canal was eventually built to replace “le portage” but it was not completed until 1876 and so it only had a few decades of commercial viability before railroads and highways replaced it.
The Columbia County courthouse is located at 400 De Witt Street in Portage. We visited Portage on March 12, 2016 on our way home from the annual maple tree tapping ceremony which was in Portage County this year. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon so there was little traffic and we were able to park right in front of the courthouse. The courthouse was built in 1962, and certainly it looks more like a county courthouse than what we had seen in Portage County earlier in the day. After I took some photos, we drove over to Pardeeville to have a burger at the Caddyshack. And that was it for this visit to Columbia County.
I visit Portage County fairly often. Sometimes it’s just to drive through to some other destination, but I do got to events here at least a couple times a year. Most years I run in the Lodi Library 5 K in August, and I have taken part in the “Pedal and Party in Pardeeville with a Purpose” bike ride against MS several times. One of the fun things about this bike ride is having a “Shackburger” at the Caddyshack Bar & Grill afterward. I am hoping to compete in the Pardeeville triathlon one of these years. And I always enjoy riding the Merrimac ferry across the Wisconsin River between Columbia County and Sauk County.