Downtown Saukville was the site of a Native American village at the crossroads of two trails before white settlers arrived in the mid-1840s.

In its early years, the community was a stagecoach stop on the road from Milwaukee to Green Bay and also grew as a mill and market town serving the dairy farmers of northwestern Ozaukee County.

As of 2019, more than 40% of the village's jobs were in manufacturing, with the largest employers being a steel mill as well as several foundries and metal fabricators.

Among other landforms, the Cedarburg Bog contains a string bog—a geographic feature that seldom occurs as far south as Wisconsin—which contains many plant species rarely seen outside remote parts of Canada.

In the mid-19th century, Increase A. Lapham identified a group of circular mounds near Saukville and found a stone ax.

[7] An additional artifact of the early Native American presence in the area is the Ozaukee County Birdstone, discovered by a six-year-old farm boy in 1891.

[9] By the early 1800s, the Native Americans in the Saukville area were probably Menominee and Sauk people,[10] who were forced to leave Wisconsin in the 1830s.

In that year, William Payne opened a stagecoach inn for travelers on the route from Milwaukee to Green Bay.

[13] In 1945, sixty German prisoners of war from Camp Fredonia in Little Kohler, Wisconsin were contracted to work at Canned Goods, Inc. in the village to make up for the loss of labor due to local men fighting in World War II.

Much of the community is located on the Saukville Reef formation, which is part of the Racine Dolomite that stretches through eastern Wisconsin and Illinois.

The formation contains Silurian marine fossils, and while much of the rock lies between 25 and 50 feet below the surface, it's exposed at some old quarries in the northern part of the village.

[17] The Kurtz Woods State Natural Area in the village, maintained by the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust, has old growth endemic trees and retains the character of the pre-settlement beech-maple forests.

[18] The village is east of the Cedarburg Bog, a 2,200 acre state natural area, which is home to many endangered plant and animal species.

[19][20] As land development continues to reduce wild areas, wildlife is forced into closer proximity with human communities like Saukville.

Large mammals, including white-tailed deer, coyotes, North American river otters and red foxes can be seen in the village.

[21] The region struggles with many invasive species, including the emerald ash borer, common carp, reed canary grass, the common reed, purple loosestrife, garlic mustard, Eurasian buckthorns, and honeysuckles.

Many of the village's manufacturers are located in the Dekora Woods Business and Industrial Park in north-central Saukville, west of Interstate 43.

[24] The Saukville Area Historical Society hosts the Crossroads Rendezvous in Peninsula Park on the third weekend in May.

The event is an educational reenactment of the annual rendezvous gatherings associated with Wisconsin's 18th and early 19th century fur trade.

[25][26] The village also hosts a farmers market in Veterans Park every Sunday from June through October, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.[27] The Oscar Grady Public Library has a collection of physical media, digital resources, and archival photos of the community.

[34] The parish also operates a parochial school in Port Washington for students from kindergarten through eighth grade.

The field station grounds and laboratories are not open to the general public, but are used by university students and faculty to conduct biological and ecological research.

Heading south from Saukville, the line is operated by the Wisconsin Central Ltd. railroad, a subsidiary of the Canadian National Railway.

The Village of Saukville maintains eight municipal parks with baseball and softball fields; basketball, tennis, and volleyball courts; football and soccer fields playgrounds; picnic shelters; and access to the Milwaukee River for fishing and canoeing.

[48] Additionally, the surrounding Town of Saukville is home to five Ozaukee County Parks on the Milwaukee River, comprising over 200 acres of parkland and including the H. H. Peters Youth Camp and the Ozaukee County Pioneer Village, an open-air museum that preserves twenty-four historic buildings from the 1840s through the early 1900s.

[19] There are over a dozen publicly and privately owned bogs in the Saukville area that are home to biodiverse ecosystems that are rare in other parts of Wisconsin.