Waupaca County courthouse on May 24, 2015
Waupaca County was created in 1851 from land that had been part of Brown and Winnebago counties. The new county was named for the Waupaca River, whose name apparently means “white sand bottom” or “pale river” or “tomorrow river” in the Menominee language. The Waupaca River is also known as the Tomorrow River over a portion of its length. It rises in northeast Portage County and flows into Waupaca County where it eventually joins the Wolf River.
Not surprisingly the city of Waupaca is the county seat. Waupaca was first settled in 1849 by Captain Augustus Hill and his sons along the Waupaca River. The settlement was incorporated as a village in 1857 by an act of the state legislature, but in 1862 it was unincorporated and then re-incorporated. Waupaca was incorporated as a city in 1875 and thankfully the state legislature has left it alone since then.
The Waupaca County courthouse is located at 811 Harding Street in Waupaca. The new courthouse was built around 1990 and is in a combined building with the sheriff’s office. I visited Waupaca on May 24, 2015; it was a rainy Sunday afternoon on Memorial Day weekend, and there weren’t too many people around.
I stopped first at Shadow Lake, or South Park as it is apparently known now. When I was a kid, we used to drive to Waupaca to swim and picnic at the Shadow Lake beach – it’s only a 45 minute drive from Appleton. The whole beach area seems more or less unchanged, though the parking lot has been paved and there is a shelter house there now. The trail to the beach has also been paved, and there aren’t as many picnic tables near the water as there used to be. The beach shelter house is in the same place but it’s obviously been refurbished at least once. The same goes for the diving rafts anchored in the lake. There is a fairly new shelter house at the top of the bluff. It’s very nice, and I think this is the reason there are not so many picnic tables close to the water.
Despite the improvements, it’s still the same beach and lake. Though it all seems somewhat smaller and more compact than I remember from 45 years ago.
After my visit to Shadow Lake, I drove through town to the new courthouse. It’s kind of on the east side of town, and it reminds me a lot of other courthouses built in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s a very nice building but there’s just not much to look at.
Beyond Shadow Lake, I really don’t have many other memories of Waupaca County. I do remember once doing a canoe trip near Weyauwega with my family and some friends. I think it was on the Crystal River. It was not a lot of fun, between the rocks in the river and the biting flies. Perhaps that’s why we only did it once!