History of Osceola

In 1822 a party of adventurous miners came up the river and progressed so far northward as the diggings afterward known as Hardscrabble (Hazel Green), while a second party landed on Grant river at an Indian village called Pascanans, near where the town of Osceola was afterward located. This is the first authentic knowledge of the advent of white men in what is now Grant county, other than the few traders already mentioned.

In November 1837, the Wisconsin legislature authorized establishing a territorial road from Osceola (a new town site on the Mississippi, about one mile south of Potosi) to Belmont, by way of Platteville. This was the first territorial road laid out in Grant County. At the same time, the legislature granted a charter for a ferry from Osceola to Jones Island in the Mississippi and from there to Parsons' Landing in Iowa to a James P. Cox and Justus Parsons. Ferrying a person from Osceola to said island, 18 3/4 cents; each head of neat cattle, 16 2/3 cents; each hog, 4 cents; each sheep, 3 cents. For carriages of all kinds, 8 1/3 cents each wheel; double the foregoing rates for crossing the Mississippi River from said island to Parsons' Landing, and for crossing both the rivers around the, island quadruple the sum for crossing the Grant.

In 1849 during the Gold Rush days, many covered wagons came here to be ferried across. At times there were so many wagons waiting there that they were lined up for miles, and eager miners had to wait several days to be taken across the river.

Thus with the mass exodus from the area along with competition from Potosi and epidemics of cholera, Osceola soon faded away. Osceola became little more than a paper town and by the later 1840's the only remnants of the town was its cemetery. All that remains today is one gravestone with the remains removed to locations elsewhere.

In recycling the structures, a frame hotel building was removed in 1840 from Oceola to Potosi, remodeled to again become a hotel. It was later known as the City Hotel, up through 1872, when it changed owners and became the Woolfolk House.

Located further south of Osceola near where the Grant River Recreational Area is located today is the Old Osceola Indian Burial Grounds, known to archeologists as Wisconsin's Old Copper Culture find. Commercial fishermen in 1945 found some Indian relics when the river at flood stage washed them into view. An archeological excavation by the Milwaukee Public Museum in conjunction with the Wisconsin Archeological Society in 1947 unearthed over 5,000 Indian artifacts, many of which were valuable Lake Superior copper pieces, Radiocarbon dates from this site indicate that the Old Copper Culture was well established by 2170 B.C. and met its demise about the time of Christ. These people were food gatherers and hunters. A few of these artifacts are displayed at St. John's Mine, but most are displayed in the Milwaukee Public Museum. From about 1000 B.C. to the coming of the white man in the 1600s, the Woodland cultures occupied this area. These people were the well-known mound grave builders whose evidence of work remains today all along the Mississippi bluffs.