Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Stanley, WI

Stanley is a city that straddles the line between Chippewa and Clark counties in west-central Wisconsin along Highway 29, roughly halfway between Green Bay and Minneapolis–St. Paul.

The first building on the site was a lumber company warehouse erected in 1871, but Stanley was formally settled and platted in 1881 when the Wisconsin Central Railroad built through the area; it was named for Lemuel C. Stanley, a Chippewa Falls merchant and railroad man involved in the first plat.

The Northwestern Lumber Company built a large mill at Stanley in 1891 and created the Stanley, Merrill and Phillips Railway to haul logs; before closing in 1920, the mill sawed an estimated 850 million board feet of lumber.

Stanley's population exploded from about 500 to 2,500 during the 1890s lumber boom; it became a village in 1895 and a city in 1898.

In 1897 the United States Leather Company opened a tannery in Stanley that employed 200 men and by 1908 was tanning 75,000 hides a year shipped in by rail.

On May 18, 1906, a fire that started in a lumber company building destroyed numerous businesses, two churches and about seventy homes in Stanley; the city rebuilt, much of it in fireproof brick.

In 1914 Stanley's Big Four Canning Factory was producing up to 100,000 cans of vegetables per day from the produce of immigrant farmers working the logged-over cutover land.

Stanley is home to the Stanley Correctional Institution, a medium-security state prison that was built starting in 1998, purchased by the State of Wisconsin in 2001, and houses around 1,500 inmates.

The prison explains Stanley's unusual census history: its population leaped 90 percent from 1,898 in 2000 to 3,608 in 2010 and reached 3,804 at the 2020 census, even though the 2010 census counted only 930 households in the city.

Stanley is home to Ace Ethanol, described as Wisconsin's first large-scale ethanol producer.