Discreet 24/7 Biohazard Remediation in Port Edwards, WI

Port Edwards is a village in Wood County on the Wisconsin River, just southwest of Wisconsin Rapids, with a population of 1,762 at the 2020 census.

The settlement began in 1840, when John Edwards Sr. and his partner Henry Clinton built a sawmill here to cut white pine lumber, and the mill became the nucleus around which the village grew.

For its first decades the place was known as Frenchtown, until it was renamed Port Edwards in 1869 in honor of mill owner John Edwards.

John Edwards Jr. took over his father's sawmill in 1859, and the business was incorporated in 1890 as the John Edwards Manufacturing Company, the parent company of the Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Company.

Port Edwards converted from lumber to paper manufacturing in 1896, made its first sheet of paper in 1897, and the Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Company — known everywhere by its acronym, NEPCO — was formally formed in 1908.

Port Edwards incorporated as a village in 1902, and for a century the paper mill so dominated local life that the company even developed much of the model mill community around it.

The mill's long run ended when Domtar, which had bought it in 2001, announced its closure in December 2007 and shut it down in 2008, eliminating more than 500 jobs in a village of under 2,000 people.

At the 2010 census Port Edwards had 1,818 residents living in 711 households, and the village spreads over about 7.3 square miles, more than a square mile of which is water.

Nepco Lake, the reservoir on the village's edge, takes its name directly from the Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Company, and in 2023 the village board backed creation of a Nepco Lake District to fund the lake's maintenance.

The village still honors its paper past: its school is named for John Edwards, and the home of L. M. Alexander — the manager who converted the mill from lumber to paper in 1896 — survives as the Alexander House Center for Art & History.