Baraboo

History

The area around Baraboo was the site of a Kickapoo village as early as 1665. The current community was established by Abe Wood in 1838, and was originally known as the village of Adams. In 1839 several settlers arrived and started building cabins, and a saw mill. In 1846 it became the county seat of Sauk County after a fierce fight with the nearby village of Reedsburg. In 1852, the village was renamed "Baraboo", after the nearby river. It was incorporated as a village in 1866 and as a city in 1882. In the 1860s, the city had surpassed a population of 2,000, and many businesses started to form, including grocery stores, banks, and hotels. In 1872, the Chicago and North Western Railway (C&NW) was built. It was later demolished and now the land is a part of the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area. Cirrus, a manufacturer of single-engine aircraft, was founded in a rural Baraboo barn in 1984 by the Klapmeier brothers. After a few years of designing the VK-30, they relocated to the Baraboo–Dells Airport and in 1994 moved the company to its present-day home in Duluth, Minnesota.

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water. West Baraboo, a suburb of Baraboo, borders the city on its west side. Baraboo gives its name to the Baraboo Syncline, a doubly plunging, asymmetric syncline in Proterozoic-aged Baraboo Quartzite. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, particularly Charles R. Van Hise, used the syncline to demonstrate that small-scale deformational structures in isolated outcrops reflect larger regional structures and that sedimentary structures could indicate the original top-facing direction within elaborately deformed strata. These two principles sparked a global revolution in structural geology during the 1920s. The nearby Baraboo Hills are designated one of the "Last Great Places" by the Nature Conservancy because of its rare rocks, plants and animals. The hills were created by glacial action, and in some points poke up from the flat terrain to form a stark contrast. Some of these features were created when a glacial pocket was formed during the Wisconsin glaciation where the advance of the glacier halted, along the edge of what is known as the Driftless Area. Devil's Lake State Park, Wisconsin's largest state park, contains large areas of the Baraboo Hills. Pewits Nest is located outside Baraboo. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Baraboo has a warm-summer humid continental climate, abbreviated "Dfb" on climate maps. The hottest temperature recorded in Baraboo was on July 5–7, 2012, while the coldest temperature recorded was on January 30, 1951. |source 2 = National Weather Service }}

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