The La Crosse County courthouse on February 19, 2017
La Crosse County was created by the state legislature in 1851 from land that had previously been part of Crawford County. The City of La Crosse is the county seat. The name of the county as well as the city comes from the Native American game of lacrosse. The first Europeans to visit the area were French fur traders probably in the late 1600s, but there is no written record of this area until the 1805 expedition of Zebulon Pike on the Mississippi River. Yes, Pike’s Peak in Colorado is named after him. He recorded the name of the area as “Prairie La Crosse.”
The first European settlement of La Crosse occurred in 1841 when Nathan Myrick, a prospective fur trader, left Prairie du Chien in Crawford County and set up his own trading post farther up the Mississippi River. The spot Myrick chose was well-suited to a trading post: it’s at the junction of the Black, La Crosse and Mississippi Rivers and is one of the few places along the Wisconsin shore of the Mississippi where there is a plain suitable for development. The settlement grew and was platted as a village in 1851. The village continued to grow rapidly and was incorporated as a city in 1856. The lumber industry was very important to the growth of the city and county, and other manufacturing moved to the city because of the good transportation provided by the Mississippi River and the railroad running between Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
The La Crosse County courthouse is at 333 Vine Street in La Crosse. This is the Law Enforcement Center of the county government; the Administrative Center is located across the street at 400 4th Street North. I visited La Crosse on February 19, 2017, and as far as I remember this was my first visit to the downtown part of the city. The courthouse (or “Courthouse and Law Enforcement Center” if you want to be completely accurate) was built in 1997. It is one of several county buildings in the area: the Administrative Center and the Health Services Center are just across the street. The courthouse is basically just a big office building, so there is nothing particularly distinctive about it. It is a nice looking building. There was some construction going on across 4th Street which made it difficult to get a good photo of the courthouse. Riverside Park is only a few blocks away and I spent some time there, walking along the Mississippi River before heading for home.
I do not have very many memories of La Crosse County. Typically it’s just a county that I drive through on my way to southern Minnesota on I-90. Several of my high school classmates attended UW – La Crosse and that is the extent of my connections to La Crosse. but it’s very scenic and the city of La Crosse seems like a nice place; it’s only a few hours drive from home, so perhaps I will visit again some day.