Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Stevens Point, WI

Stevens Point is a city in Portage County and its county seat, established in 1847 and incorporated in 1858, with a population of 25,666 at the 2020 census.

The city is named for George Stevens, who ran a grocery and supply post on a bend of the Wisconsin River where loggers floating timber downstream found a convenient stopping point.

Known in its logging heyday as the 'Gateway to the Pineries,' Stevens Point sits on land that was Menominee homeland until a three-mile strip along the Wisconsin River was ceded to the United States in an 1836 treaty.

Postal service arrived in 1845, and within twenty years the young river town's population had tripled on the strength of the pine trade.

After 1860 Polish immigrants made up more than half of the city's new arrivals, giving Stevens Point one of Wisconsin's strongest Polish-American heritages; the farmers market held on Mathias Mitchell Public Square, platted in 1847, is often cited as the longest-running farmers market in Wisconsin.

Stevens Point is home to the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, founded in 1894 as the Stevens Point Normal School and now enrolling about 7,300 undergraduate and 650 graduate students, with a nationally known College of Natural Resources.

The city also hosts a campus of Mid-State Technical College, and Census QuickFacts data show its households average just 2.13 people — a figure shaped by its large student population.

The Stevens Point Brewery was founded in 1857 by German immigrants Frank Wahle and George Ruder, a year before the city itself incorporated, and as one of America's oldest breweries it survived Prohibition by making near beer; its Point Special Lager remains its flagship.

Sentry Insurance, one of the largest mutual insurance groups in the United States, was founded in 1904 by members of the Wisconsin Retail Hardware Association, moved to Stevens Point in 1912, and is headquartered here today as Portage County's largest employer.

Sentry's original downtown home, the 1922 Hardware Mutual Insurance Companies Building, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the company opened its SentryWorld golf course — designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. — in 1982.