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More on William Henry Wheeler
Will's
Northwoods Inn was founded in 1991 by descendants of William
Henry Wheeler. Will Wheeler was born in 1847 at Odanah (near
Ashland, Wisconsin) in what was then known as the Northwest
Territory. His parents, Leonard and Harriet Wheeler, were
Congregational missionaries to the Ojibwa Indians who settled on
Madeline Island, one of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. A
few years later, the Wheelers founded the town of Odanah, where
their son Will was born.
Leonard
Wheeler was an early advocate of Indian or Native American
rights, consistently opposing efforts by the federal government
to remove the Ojibwas from their tribal lands in northern
Wisconsin to land west of the Mississippi. During the winter of
1849, Leonard Wheeler walked 250 miles through the snow from
Odanah to Sparta, Wisconsin to catch a train to Washington DC,
where he successfully opposed an effort to relocate an Ojibwa
tribe from their lands on Lac Court Oreilles near Hayward.
Will
Wheeler grew up with the Ojibwa at Odanah, and his recollections
of that period were published in the Milwaukee Journal in 1931.
A copy of the article is displayed at Will's . The Wheeler
family subsequently moved to Beloit, where Leonard proved to be
something of an entrepreneur, selling the design of a windmill
he had developed and patented to the Fairbanks Morse Company.
Thousands of these windmills were sold by Fairbanks Morse for
use on the Midwestern plains.
Will Wheeler died in Beloit in
1937. He was the great-great-grandfather of Will Bunge, one of
the original bartenders at Will's Northwoods Inn when it opened
on April 1, 1991, 150 years after Leonard and Harriet Wheeler
first arrived in Wisconsin.
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