Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Portage, WI

Portage is a city in and the county seat of Columbia County, Wisconsin, and it is part of the Madison metropolitan area.

Portage takes its name from the short overland carry between the Fox River and the Wisconsin River — under two miles of marsh and prairie linking the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi River watershed.

Explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet crossed the portage in 1673 on their way to the Mississippi River, and fur traders used the route for more than a century afterward.

The first settler at Portage was Lawrence Barth, who entered the carrying trade there in 1793, and Jacques Vieau established a trading post at the site in 1797.

The U.S. Army built Fort Winnebago at the east end of the portage beginning in 1828 to guard the route, and a young lieutenant named Jefferson Davis helped complete the fort in 1832.

The Fort Winnebago Surgeon's Quarters, now a historic site, is the only original building of the fort still standing, and the Old Indian Agency House built in 1832 also survives nearby.

The Portage Canal, completed in 1856, finally joined the two rivers by water, and that June the stern-wheeler Aquila passed through it on a voyage from Pittsburgh to Green Bay.

Commercial traffic on the canal faded once the railroads arrived, and the Army Corps of Engineers closed the Portage Canal for good in 1951.

Portage is the birthplace of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, born there in 1861, whose 1893 'frontier thesis' reshaped the study of American history.

Portage was also the hometown of author Zona Gale, born there in 1874, who in 1921 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Miss Lulu Bett.