Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Wabeno, WI

Wabeno is an unincorporated census-designated place in the town of Wabeno in Forest County, Wisconsin, located on Wisconsin Highway 32 at the eastern end of Highway 52, inside the Nicolet National Forest.

Wabeno was platted in 1897 on land where a tornado in June 1880 had cleared the timber, and its name comes from 'waubeno,' a Potawatomi word meaning 'coming of the winds.'

A brief but intense lumber boom followed the arrival of the Chicago and North Western Railway — by 1905 five sawmills in Wabeno were producing about 35 million board feet of lumber a year, though the last mill closed in 1936.

Wabeno had 453 residents at the 2020 census, down from 575 at the 2010 census.

The town owns one of the few remaining operational steam-powered logging haulers in the nation — a Phoenix log hauler built in the early 1900s, used by the Jones Lumber Company from 1909 to 1935, bought by the town in 1944 and restored to life in 1965; it is fired up each year for Wabeno Steam-Up Days.

Downtown Wabeno is watched over by Larry the Logroller, a roughly 20-foot fiberglass statue of a logger beside the band shell in the town park, built around 1960.

The Wabeno Logging Museum, built by the local Lions Club in 1941 as a replica logging camp, preserves memorabilia from the most colorful era in Forest County history.

The Wabeno Public Library operates out of a nineteenth-century log building constructed in 1897 by the Chicago and North Western Railway as a land office and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.

Wabeno's tap water was voted the best-tasting water in Wisconsin in 2003, and the town has bottled it under the name 'Wabeno Water.'

The Wabeno area is crossed by the Lumberjack Memorial Snowmobile Trails, a system of more than 100 miles of groomed trails, and the Northern Lights Bingo and Casino, run by the Forest County Potawatomi, sits about four miles away.