Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Marinette, WI

Marinette is the county seat of Marinette County, sitting at the mouth of the Menominee River on Green Bay, directly across the river from its twin city, Menominee, Michigan.

The city is named for 'Queen Marinette' (Marie Antoinette Chevalier), a Métis fur trader who ran a trading post on the river with her partner William Farnsworth; Britannica traces the settlement to a trading post established in 1794 by French Canadian fur trader Stanislaus Chappu.

When the fur trade declined, Farnsworth turned to lumbering in 1831, and the Menominee River became one of the most important lumbering rivers in the Upper Great Lakes between 1865 and 1895, with logs floated downriver to sawmills on both banks.

At the industry's 1895 peak there were 22 sawmills on the Menominee River, nine of them on the Marinette side; the last log drive came in 1917 and Marinette's last sawmill closed on July 31, 1931.

Marinette's most prominent lumberman, Isaac 'Ike' Stephenson, later served in the U.S. Senate (1906-1914); Stephenson Island in the Menominee River and the Stephenson Public Library are named for him.

Stephenson Island is an uninhabited city park crossed by U.S. Highway 41, home to a logging museum run by the Marinette County Historical Society and to the city's Civil War Soldiers Memorial, dedicated in 1917.

The Menekaunee neighborhood, one of the city's oldest areas, hosted the first steam sawmill on the river, built by the New York Lumber Company in 1856.

Fincantieri Marinette Marine, founded as Marinette Marine Corporation in 1942, has built more than 1,300 vessels and today builds the U.S. Navy's Freedom-variant littoral combat ships with Lockheed Martin; in April 2020 it won the contract for the Navy's Constellation-class guided-missile frigates.

The USS Marinette (LCS 25), commissioned in September 2023, is the first U.S. Navy ship named for the city and the only Navy vessel built, christened and commissioned in its namesake city, according to the U.S. Navy.

Marinette is home to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay's Marinette Campus, which partners with the shipyard on training for the shipbuilding industry.