Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Cornucopia, WI

Cornucopia is an unincorporated census-designated place in the town of Bell in northern Bayfield County, Wisconsin, situated on Lake Superior at the northern end of the Bayfield Peninsula along Wisconsin Highway 13.

Cornucopia had a population of just 103 at the 2020 census, up slightly from 98 in 2010, spread across about 2.26 square miles.

The community borders Lake Superior at Siskiwit Bay, between Roman's Point and Mawikwe Point; 'Siskiwit' comes from an Ojibwe word for a subspecies of lake trout known in English as a 'fat trout.'

The Ojibwe used the Siskiwit Bay area as a temporary camp and a stopover on the way to La Pointe, and a historical marker at the Cornucopia beach tells of the Tragedy of the Siskiwit, an Ojibwe battle with a band of Meskwaki on that site.

The first white settlers in the Siskiwit Bay area were loggers who arrived at the close of the nineteenth century.

In 1903, land speculators T. J. Stevenson and Albert Wescott of Iowa established a post office here and gave the village the name 'Cornucopia' for its abundance of resources.

Commercial fishing for lake trout, whitefish, and freshwater herring has traditionally operated out of Cornucopia's harbor; the Jones, Ehlers, Johnson, and Ivanow families kept the industry going through the twentieth century, and today only the Halvorson family still fishes commercially out of Cornucopia.

The Cornucopia Historic (Green Shed) Museum stands on the harbor in a fish processing shed built around 1938; after the shed closed in the late 1960s, the community converted it into a museum in time for Cornucopia's 2003 centennial.

Ehlers' General Store, founded in 1915 as the Flieth-Ehlers Mercantile Company, has been the social and commercial center of the community since its beginnings.

Cornucopia sits near a mainland portion of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, which features the Mawikwe Bay Sea Caves.