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Marinette County Wisconsin WIGenWeb |
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| First Inhabitants The first recorded inhabitants of the Menominee River Basin were a small Algonquin tribe known as "the wild rice people." Journals of seventeenth and early eighteenth century explorers describe a tribe of forty to eighty men living in a single village at the mouth of the Menominee River. By the early 1820s, the Menominee numbered about 500 men, and were scattered throughout a dozen villages in Wisconsin. Between 1670 and the early 1800s, various explorers, fur traders and missionaries visited the area as they passed by on the water routes of Green Bay and the Menominee River. | Stanislaus Chappu The first known white settler on the Menominee River was Stanislaus Chappu, or Chappee, a French-Canadian fur trader who operated a log trading post at the site of Marinette between 1794 and 1824. Another fur trader, William Farnsworth, arrived at the Menominee River Basin in 1822. Two years later he usurped Chappee's position as the area's fur trader as he forcibly ejected Chappee from his trading post with the help of nearby Chippewa Indians. |
Origin of place name of Marinette There are two explanations of the place name of Marinette. 1) Marinette is a contraction of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, whose tragic death at the time of the French Revolution, caused much excitement among the French settlers in this territory. The French and Indians on the river when saying "Marie Antoinette" shorten the name by pronouncing it "Marinette." 2) Another explanation is the county ais named for a French-Indian woman by the name of Marinette Jacobs. |
Marinette County Centennial 1879 - 1979 -- This booklet was printed in 1979 to commemorate the county's centennial. It is chock full of people, places and things of interest.