Fox River (Wisconsin)

Encyclopedia : F : FO : FOX : Fox River (Wisconsin)

This article is about the river in central and eastern Wisconsin. For the unrelated river that begins in far southeastern Wisconsin, see Fox River (Illinois).

One of the Tall Ships, Windy II sails from the Bay of Green Bay south into the mouth of the Fox River, under the Leo Frigo Bridge in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Fox River of central and eastern Wisconsin flows from central Wisconsin through Lake Winnebago into the Bay of Green Bay. Green Bay is part of Lake Michigan, the third largest of the five Great Lakes. This this makes it one of the few North American rivers that flows north, (or in general, northeast).

The Fox River features a total length of 322km when the "Upper Fox River" tributary is included. The most common reference today is to what geographers call the "Lower Fox River" which runs through such cities as Neenah and Menasha. This is a stretch of the Fox about 64km long when measured from its outlet at Lake Winnebago. The Fox River has a second major tributary named the Wolf River.

The Fox-Wolf watershed drains an area of about 16,650 km², with a discharge rate of 117 cubic meters per second into the Bay of Green Bay. There are currently 12 dams and 17 locks on the Lower Fox river. The river drops about 50 meters in the 64 km section of the river out of Lake Winnebago. Prior to the construction of European-style dams after 1850, the river had many sizable rapids.

Culture

Prior to European settlement in the late 1600s, the shores of the Fox River and Green Bay were home to roughly half the 25,000 Native Americans who lived in what is today the State of Wisconsin. Early French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet portaged from this river to the Wisconsin River and then to the Mississippi river during the French colonization of the Americas. The French-Canadian men who established homes on the Fox River married First Nation women, producing a mixed-blood population similar to the Metis of Canada.

According to the Wisconsin Paper Council, the Lower Fox River has a high concentration of pulp and paper mills compared to other rivers. While not officially designated a U.S. Superfund site, the Lower Fox River bottom has some sections contaminated with toxic chemicals, primarily PCBs. These contaminated sediments are the river's current environmental problem. Involved in the debate are the environmentalists, paper industry, Indian tribes, and elected officials at the federal, state and local levels.

Public debate and litigation about these sediments has been occurring since the 1970s. However, historians report that as early as 1923, there were similar debates about Fox River water quality involving other pollutants. One contaminant of special concern today is a group of chemicals called Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs. PCBs entered the river from many sources, but the largest deposits of contaminated sediments is traceable from the local paper recycling mills which have been part of the region's history, culture and economy, thus making it a difficult issue.

Since the late 1800s, dredging of river bottom sediments has been done to allow large ships to enter the Fox River. The contaminated sediment has been used since the 1960s to fill local wetlands and after 1978 to create an off-shore engineered holding area called Renard Isle aka, Kidney Island.

According to some measures of pollution (e.g. dissolved oxygen, pollution-tolerant worm counts), the Lower Fox River is much cleaner than it was before 1972. However, according to other measures of pollution (e.g., phosphorus, estrogenic compounds, discarded pharmaceuticals), the river waters are slightly more contaminated than before 1972.

Among the wildlife includes birds such as mallard ducks, and fish such as walleye.

Fox River (Wisconsin)

Culture

See also