24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Thorp Thorp, WI

Thorp is a city in Clark County, Wisconsin, and its population was 1,795 at the 2020 census, its highest count ever recorded.

Thorp got its name from Joseph G. Thorp, founder of the Eau Claire Lumber Company and a former state senator — when the Wisconsin Central Railroad arrived in 1880, it named its station 'Thorpe' after him, and the name was soon shortened to Thorp.

Before the railroad came, the little settlement was known as North Fork, and its first settler, James Seneca Boardman, arrived in 1870 and hauled hand-shaved shingles 50 miles by ox-sled to Black River Falls to trade for supplies.

Thorp was incorporated as a village in 1893 — partly, the record says, to hire a peace officer and stop drunken brawls, bad language, and cattle and pigs running loose in the streets — and it became a city in 1948.

At the 2010 census Thorp had 1,621 people living in 712 households, and the city is split between the towns of Thorp and Withee.

Polish immigrants who arrived in the late 1880s settled the cutover land east of Thorp and built St. Hedwig's Catholic Church — first a wooden church in 1891, then the huge brick church that still stands today in 1904.

Dairying replaced lumber as Thorp's backbone in the early 1900s, and the Thorp Dairy Company opened its first creamery in 1907 and had six operating in the area by 1917.

Local students attend the School District of Thorp, which runs Thorp High School, and the village also has a Thorp Catholic School for grades 1 through 8.

Thorp is the hometown of two-time U.S. Open champion golfer Andy North and of Mike Maslowski, a former starting linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs.

The city covers just 1.41 square miles, set in the former Ojibwe (Chippewa) forest country that was ceded to the United States in the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters.