Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Plover, WI

Plover is a village in Portage County with 13,519 residents at the 2020 census, making it the most populous village in the county and its second-largest municipality after Stevens Point.

The site was first known as Plover Portage, named for the portage between the lower and upper Wisconsin River, and an 1825 treaty established it as a boundary point between the Chippewa and Winnebago tribes.

Settled in 1844, Plover was chosen as the first county seat of Portage County and was officially platted in 1845.

Plover incorporated on March 6, 1857, becoming the first incorporated municipality in Portage County — but it lost the county seat to Stevens Point in 1868 and dissolved back into a town in 1870.

The village went through two more cycles of incorporation and dissolution, in 1912 and 1931, before its fourth and current incorporation on September 28, 1971.

Since re-incorporating, Plover has exploded in size, growing from about 2,618 residents in 1970 to 13,519 in 2020 as it became the main residential and commercial engine of southern Portage County.

Census Bureau survey data counted about 5,245 occupied households in the village in 2020, and Plover is a major regional center for agriculture and food processing in Wisconsin's Central Sands potato-growing country.

Plover hosts the Wisconsin Korean War Veterans Memorial, set on an island in Lake Pacawa at Lake Pacawa Park, where granite walls carry the names of the 801 Wisconsinites killed in that war; the village offered the island site in the early 1990s and the memorial was erected in 1993.

The village maintains the Sentry Curling Center, and Plover has been recognized as a Bird City Wisconsin community since 2012 for its bird conservation work.

Plover sits on the Interstate 39 and U.S. Highway 51 corridor directly south of Stevens Point and forms a central hub of the Stevens Point micropolitan area.