24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Waupun, WI

Waupun is a city that straddles the Dodge and Fond du Lac county line in Wisconsin — of its 11,344 residents in the 2020 census, 7,795 lived in Dodge County and 3,549 in Fond du Lac County.

Waupun was founded in 1839 by Seymour Wilcox, the first settler along the Rock River in what was then heavily forested land, and the name comes from the Ojibwe word "Waubun."

The 1847 territorial census already showed 956 people in Waupun Township, and Waupun received its charter as a city in 1878.

In 1851 Waupun was chosen as the site of the Wisconsin State Penitentiary because of its abundant limestone for construction, and the prison's main building, constructed in 1854, is still in use today.

Waupun is nicknamed "Prison City" because it hosts three state correctional facilities — Waupun Correctional Institution, Dodge Correctional Institution, and the John C. Burke Correctional Center — and roughly a quarter of the city's counted population is incarcerated.

Because so many residents are inmates, Waupun's census figures are unusual: the 2010 census counted 11,340 people but only 3,485 households, including about 2,741 incarcerated men.

Waupun is also known as the "City of Sculptures," thanks to local inventor and manufacturer Clarence Shaler, who made his fortune with a replaceable umbrella cover and spent his later years filling the city with bronze art.

Waupun's most famous work is James Earle Fraser's "The End of the Trail," a bronze of an exhausted Native American rider that Shaler commissioned after seeing the original at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition; it was unveiled in Shaler Park in 1929 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Shaler also commissioned Lorado Taft's "Recording Angel," placed in Forest Mound Cemetery in 1923 in memory of his wife, and a modern sculpture tour through Waupun now features 13 works.

The Waupun Heritage Museum preserves the city's story inside its historic 1915 Carnegie library building.