Public Profile

Wausau is a small city in north-central Wisconsin, the county seat of Marathon County, located on the Wisconsin River roughly 180 miles north of Madison. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century as a lumber town, the city is the historic and continuing center of the world’s commercial ginseng industry — Marathon County produces, by most estimates, roughly 95 percent of all American ginseng — a fact that local civic publications have for several decades regarded as deserving wider acknowledgment than it receives.

The city’s economy has diversified beyond ginseng to include insurance underwriting (Wausau Insurance Group, founded 1911, is one of the city’s largest employers), specialty paper, and seasonal tourism associated with Granite Peak Ski Area on Rib Mountain. The population is approximately 39,000, with a metropolitan area of roughly 138,000.

Wausau is, by reputation and self-description, the kind of place in which civic life proceeds at a steady, predictable cadence — Rotary on Wednesdays, parade on the Fourth, snow removal on a published schedule — and in which deviations from the cadence are, as a matter of local temperament, noticed. The downtown is intact. The river is clean. The high school football team has been competitive without being notable.

Politically, Marathon County is a swing region in a swing state, and has accordingly received a disproportionate volume of attention from national political reporters during election years, an attention residents tolerate with what one local newspaper editor has called “the steady forbearance of a place that knows it is being studied.”

Local Character and Recurring Themes

  • Ginseng primacy. Marathon County’s status as the global capital of cultivated American ginseng is treated locally with the quiet, steady civic pride of a town that suspects, correctly, that most outsiders do not know what ginseng is. The annual International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival is a regional event of moderate scale and immoderate self-regard.
  • Snow culture. The city averages forty-eight inches of snow per year. Snow removal is a civic religion. The municipal plow schedule is published and consulted. Driveways are cleared by sunrise.
  • The German and Hmong communities. Wausau is home to one of the largest Hmong-American populations in the Midwest, a community that has, since resettlement in the late 1970s, become an inseparable part of the city’s civic life. Local German-American heritage organizations and Hmong cultural associations hold neighboring booths at the annual summer festival, and have, over four decades, developed what one local historian has called “a working understanding of which sausages are which.”
  • Civic steadiness. Wausau is, in its self-conception, a steady place. The civic temperament has been described, in a 2019 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel feature, as “Lutheran with options.” Residents who report unusual emotional states tend to be referred, eventually, to the same primary care physician.

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