Cornucopia

History

The Ojibwe used the Siskiwit Bay area as a temporary camp and a stopover on the way to La Pointe. "Siskiwit" comes from an Ojibwe word for a subspecies of Lake trout known in English as a "fat trout". A historical marker at the Cornucopia beach tells of the Tragedy of the Siskiwit, an Ojibwe battle on that site with a band of Meskwaki that lead to several deaths and the kidnapping of a chief's son. The first white settlers in the Siskiwit Bay area were loggers who came at the close of the nineteenth century. Remnants of this period include abandoned railroad pilings in Siskiwit Lake and a legend of stolen gold on Gold Hill at the southeastern edge of the community. The first farmers were "Russians" who came to the Town of Bell from the Austrian Empire via Chicago. They were not Great Russians but Carpatho-Russians or Rusyns, an ethnic group found in the mountainous borderlands of Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and, Romania. Rusyn surnames found in Cornucopia include Kaseno, Celinsky, Sveda, Roman, and Pristash. Commercial fishing for lake trout, whitefish, and freshwater herring has traditionally operated out of Cornucopia's harbor. The Jones, Ehlers, Johnson, and Ivanow families kept the fishing industry going during the twentieth century. Today only the Halvorson family engages in commercial fishing out of Cornucopia. In 1903, T.J. Stevenson and Albert Wescott, two land speculators from Iowa established a post office and gave the village the name "Cornucopia" for its abundance of resources. A centennial celebration in 2003 recognized this event. After World War II, Cornucopia's natural environment led tourism to replace logging, farming, and fishing as the dominant industry of the community. Today, most working-age residents are engaged in trades, service, or…

Geography

Cornucopia has an area of , all land.

Race & ethnicity