This week in Onalaska
Nothing on Onalaska’s calendar for the next two weeks yet.
About Onalaska
Onalaska began in 1851, when Thomas Rowe and John Laird laid out a village on a ridge above the Black River, and for its first decades sawmills and lumber kept the town going. People say Rowe took the name from a line about 'Oonalaska's shore' in a poem he loved, though a local historian thought it came from a Lenape woman named Onalaska. In the 1930s a lock and dam on the Mississippi flooded the river bottoms below town and made Lake Onalaska, and the city now calls itself the Sunfish Capital of the World. Today families fish and boat on the lake, ride the Great River State Trail north from town, and cheer on the Hilltoppers, whose show choir hosts a big competition every year.