A community in Sauk Co. at latitude 433604N and longitude 0894737W

Swimmers at a Lake Delton, ca. 1932 (WHI-49478)

Lake Delton, in Sauk Co., is a center of Wisconsin's tourist industry. It was originally named Norris after the surveyor who laid it out in 1849, but the name was soon changed to Delton, a contractions of "Dell Town." Over the next decade its inhabitants became well-known for making wagons, buggies, cast-iron plows, and other implements. These were all hand-made in small shops and the label "Manufactured in Delton, Wis." came to stand for high-quality craftsmanship. Soon after the Civil War, however, wagons and agricultural equipment began to be made more cheaply in larger factories elsewhere. When the railroad by-passed Delton, business owners followed it and the village withered. A visitor in 1924 described deserted Delton as "only a name, utterly meaningless to the thousands who may pass through it during the [tourist] season..."

But the very next year an imaginative Chicago millionaire named William J. Newman decided to turn Delton into an ultra-modern vacation resort. He invested more than $1,000,000 in improvements that included the state-of-the-art Dell View Hotel , dammed Dell Creek, and on July 27, 1927, let the pretty little valley fill up with water. The Great Depression nearly killed the resort town, but when the economy revived after World War Two, the Dells turned into the state's premier tourist destination and Lake Delton became one of its chief attractions. In 1953, Tommy Bartlett (1914-1998) established his Water Ski and Jumping Boat Thrill Show at Lake Delton, and in the next half century more than 20 million people came to the Dells to see it.

On June 9, 2008, Lake Delton (the body of water, not the village) disappeared after a weekend of torrential rains. Dell Creek and its tributaries filled with so much water that a 400-foot section of William Newman's 1927 earthen dike collapsed. Once breached by the swollen creek, its banks melted away and were swept downstream, carrying several houses with it.

For more information, view the article "Creating Lake Delton" at Odd Wisconsin. View historic pictures of the town at Wisconsin Historic Images. 

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[Source: U.S. Geographic Names Information Server; Odd Wisconsin]