Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Owen, WI

Owen is a small city in Clark County in central Wisconsin, located directly east of the village of Withee, which is about half Owen's size.

Owen owes its existence to the lumber industry: the Wisconsin Central Railroad built through the site in 1880, and in 1893 the John S. Owen Company of Eau Claire bought 400 square miles of virgin timber stretching from Owen north through Taylor County into Rusk County.

The city is named for lumberman John S. Owen and his family, whose company founded and built the town around its sawmill.

Owen incorporated as a village in 1904 with just 315 people, and by 1925, with the population slightly over 1,200, it incorporated as a city.

The Owen Company built much of the young town itself, starting the Owen Box and Crating factory and the Woodland Hotel in 1906, bringing electrical service to the village that same year, and organizing the State Bank of Owen in 1907.

By 1918 the Owen Company was running 25 miles of its own logging railroad across Clark and Taylor counties to haul logs to its sawmill, but the timber ran out and the last log was sawed in 1932.

Early promoters of Owen deliberately sold the cut-over timberland to settlers — about 200 families a year took up small farms around Owen — so the area converted from pine forest to farmland as the logging era ended.

Booster-era Owen promoted itself with the slogan "Owen, a Lusty Little Village."

Owen had a population of 916 at the 2020 census, down from a lumber-boom peak of more than 1,200 in the 1920s.

At the 2010 census, Owen's 940 residents lived in 419 households, in a city covering about 1.84 square miles near the Popple River.