How Stephenson got its name

Stephenson grew up on the Little Cedar River, and it earned its place the railroad way. When the Chicago and North Western built its line between Menominee and Escanaba around 1870 — racing to finish in a year, building from both ends at once — the little settlement halfway along became just what a steam railroad needed: a place to take on water. A depot followed, and a post office opened in 1874 under the settlement’s first name, Wacedah. Two years later the post office was renamed Stephenson, and the name stuck.

The honor went to Samuel M. Stephenson, who had come from New Brunswick as a boy, grown up in the Delta County lumber woods, and settled in Menominee in 1858, where he built a fortune in lumber and land, chaired the county board for years, and went on to serve four terms in Congress. The city itself puts it a little more broadly — the name salutes the early lumbermen named Stephenson, a remarkable family all around. Samuel’s brother Isaac became one of the richest lumbermen on the lakes and a United States Senator from Wisconsin, and the village streets here still carry the brothers’ first names, Robert and Samuel. Best of all: across the river, Wisconsin has its own town of Stephenson — named for Isaac. Two states, two Stephensons, one family.

The village incorporated in 1898 and became a city in 1969, and it’s still a tidy square mile of U.S. 41 farm country with the Little Cedar running through the middle of it — a small town that wears a big lumber name.