The first recorded Europeans in the county were Father Louis Hennepin and his company, who canoed up the Chippewa in 1680 when the area was part of New France, on their way to Lac Courte Oreilles and Madeline Island.

[3]: 6  An Indian settlement lay on the bank of the Chippewa near where St. Francis of Assisi Mission Church stands.

[4] European-American settlement began near that Indian village in 1847, when Adolph La Ronge and his wife came from Canada.

By the 1860s the Daniel Shaw Lumber Company had a farm two miles west (across from modern Flater's Resort) to support their operations.

[3]: 6 Loggers initially went up the rivers and cut the choicest pine in winter, then drove masses of logs down to sawmills in Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire on the spring and early summer floods.

Stopping places (rough inns) were located about every five miles, where lumberjacks could rest and carouse on their way to and from the camps.

In the 1890s the CR&M had shops and an engine house there and Apollonia grew to 350 people - the largest town at that time in the current bounds of Rusk County.

[8]: 28–30 The Soo Line continued east in 1884 and 1885, creating other stations which would develop as the towns of Weyerhaeuser, Bruce, Warner (now Ladysmith), Deer Tail (now Tony), Miller's Siding (now Glen Flora), Ingram and Hawkins.

[9] The 1901 legislation also designated Corbett (now Ladysmith) as the county seat, which was challenged by other towns all the way to the state supreme court.

[3]: 7  The stations along this line spawned another string of hamlets: Sheldon, Conrath, Crane and Murry.

[7] With the decline of timber came uncertainty about the way forward, which led to schemes for mining, large-scale ranching, and manufacturing that came to nothing.

The farmers grazed cattle, grew potatoes and rutabagas among the stumps, and gradually cleared the land with fire, dynamite and plows, eventually scratching out 40- and 80-acre family farms.

The sawmill towns shifted to serving surrounding farms with stores, creameries, and feed mills.

The camp was started in June 1933 in the town of Murry in the Blue Hills, then moved in November to a site in Cedar Rapids north of Glen Flora.

When the U.S. entered WWII, some of the CCCs enlisted or were drafted, and CCC Camp Rusk shortly disbanded.

[3]: 56  Rusk County Normal School opened in Ladysmith in 1907, and by the time it closed in 1948 it had trained 719 qualified teachers.

Mining so near the Flambeau River was controversial, with an initial plan blocked by the local zoning committee.

[13] Over the years, sawmills and cheese factories in the smaller towns have closed, but other industries have grown.

[23] Additionally, there were no reported induced abortions performed on women of Rusk County residence in 2017.

He further increased his margin of victory to nearly 35% in 2020 while turning in the best vote share for a Republican in the county in a century at nearly 67%.