Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Chelsea, WI

Chelsea is an unincorporated census-designated place in the town of Chelsea, Taylor County, Wisconsin, about 5 miles west-southwest of Rib Lake.

Chelsea was started by the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company, which cut its line north through the forest toward Ashland in the early 1870s and built a station every five to ten miles; Chelsea was the second station north of Medford.

The railroad named the station after Chelsea, Massachusetts, because many of the Wisconsin Central's investors were from Boston.

The railroad platted the village of Chelsea in 1874 and built a depot and a pumping station there to refill its steam locomotives with water.

Chelsea's first school was built in 1875, a one-room frame building that had eleven students enrolled the following year.

Much of Chelsea burned in 1876, along with its sawmill, but the settlement was rebuilt, and a rail spur built in 1883 carried Rib Lake lumber through Chelsea for decades.

By 1888 four trains a day rumbled through Chelsea — a morning mail train, an afternoon passenger train and two freights.

Chelsea's big sawmill finally closed in 1918 as local timber ran out, the rail line itself closed in 1988, and the old railroad corridor through town is now the Pine Line bike trail.

As of the 2020 census, Chelsea's population was 106, down slightly from 113 in 2010.

The Chelsea CDP covers just 0.46 square miles, all land, at an elevation of about 1,529 feet amid the hilly, lake-dotted Perkinstown terminal moraine country of Taylor County.