The John and Anna Wywialowski Farmstead was established in 1936 in the Town of Armstrong Creek in the heart of Wisconsin’s Cutover region. By about 1900 lumber companies had cleared much of the woodlands in the northern third of the state, leaving vast acres of stumpland in their wake. In an effort to find a new – and profitable – use for this land, lumber companies and land speculators sold individual plots to would-be farmers, many of whom had been drawn from immigrant populations in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. However, the harshness of the Cutover frontier, the agricultural depression that followed World War I, and the Great Depression of the 1930s made the failure of many family-run Cutover farms more common than success.

In 1936, John and Anna Wywialowski purchased their property along Highway 101 as an expansion of the dairy and potato farm that they had begun ten years earlier on an adjacent plot. John and Anna, along with their seventeen children, worked through the Depression to turn their Cutover property from a struggling, two-cow frontier farm to a successful dairy farm that, at its height, handled over one hundred head of cattle. The history of the Wywialowski family is one of the region’s few success stories.

The harshness of the Cutover frontier, the agricultural depression that followed World War I, and the Great Depression of the 1930s made the failure of many family-run Cutover farms more common than success. The history of the Wywialowski family is one of the region’s few success stories, and the John and Anna Wywialowski Farmstead is the physical representation of that success. As such, the property is an excellent representative of an early- to mid-twentieth-century Cutover farm. The property’s eight contributing resources represent the evolution of the farm from a very simple, frontier-like outfit in the 1930s to a modern, mid-century farming operation.

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