Biohazard Cleanup Near West Cornell Cornell, WI

Cornell is a city in Chippewa County on the Chippewa River, upstream from Lake Wissota, where Wisconsin Highway 64 crosses the river.

The settlement was first called Brunet Falls, after French-born trader Jean Brunet, who opened a trading post in the area in 1843.

Cornell was named for Ezra Cornell, co-founder of Western Union, who owned a vast amount of timberland in the area; when he died in 1874, that land became part of the endowment of Cornell University.

Ezra Cornell's purchase of scrip for some 500,000 acres of northern Wisconsin timberland around present-day Cornell helped build the Ivy League university's endowment as the land appreciated over decades.

Cornell is home to the world's only surviving pulpwood stacker, a towering steel conveyor built in 1911-1912 for the Cornell Wood Products paper mill.

The stacker stands 175 feet tall, ran on a 35-horsepower electric motor, and stacked pulpwood logs from 1912 until it became obsolete in 1971.

The Cornell Pulpwood Stacker was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 23, 1993, and now anchors the city's Mill Yard Park.

Cornell celebrates its logging heritage each year with an annual town fair known as the Stacker Festival.

Brunet Island State Park sits adjacent to the city, and the northern trailhead of the paved Old Abe State Trail is located in downtown Cornell.

Cornell peaked at 1,944 residents in 1950 during its paper-mill heyday and counted 1,453 people in the 2020 census.