Thorp is a city in Clark County, Wisconsin, United States.

[7] According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1.41 square miles (3.65 km2), all of it land.

[8] The forest around Thorp was Ojibwe (Chippewa) territory in the decades before white settlers arrived.

In the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters, the Ojibwe ceded Thorp and much of northern Wisconsin to the U.S.[9] Around 1837 a sawmill and settlement began in Chippewa Falls to the west.

[11] From 1847 to 1853 surveyors for the U.S. government marked off the section lines that would become Thorp and assessed timber and land quality.

[12][13] The first settler near what would become Thorp was James Seneca Boardman, arriving in 1870 and building a log cabin for his family in what would become the Town of Withee.

Goodwin and George W. Richards settled in what is now the Town of Withee and Michael McCaffrey started a home within what are now the city limits of Thorp.

They generally tried to clear land in the summer and made shingles or worked in logging camps in winter.

James Boardman's brother Ephraim arrived with his family in late 1872, and in the next few years they were joined by George Courter, Nelson Courter, William Buyatt, S.S. Warner, Zeph Worden, William Jerard and F.M.

The teacher was Mrs. Almeda Edmunds from Black River Falls, and she boarded with the J.S.

Brown established a post office named Winnieoka four miles east of what would become Thorp.

The 29 voters also agreed on some taxes: $1000 for improving roads, $300 for bridges, $25 for the school fund.

[14] The name honored Joseph G. Thorp, who founded the Eau Claire Lumber Company in 1866 and was a state senator in the 1860s and 1870s.

[14] The First Baptist Church formed in 1882, with the Methodist Episcopal soon after, and St. Bernard's Catholic parish soon after.

By then much of the timber there was cut off, leaving this cutover land reduced to stumps and brush.

[16] By 1894, major businesses in town were Nye, Lusk and Hudson's Saw Mill and Lumber Yard, the E.A.

The population was 837 by this time, and the reasons listed for incorporating included the need for a peace officer and jail to reduce the drunken brawls and disorderliness and bad language in the streets, the cattle and pigs running loose, the manure and filth in the streets, and the need for fire suppression.

Addressing some of those concerns, the following year the new village installed a waterworks system with ten fire hydrants around town, and organized a hose company.

An electric light plant was installed in 1901, a volunteer fire department in 1902, and a public sewer system in 1914.

[14] The Thorp Telephone Company was organized as a private business in 1904, with fifty phones connected and Miss Allie Bruno manually making the first connections at a magneto switchboard in a building behind the Connor saloon.

[14] Farming and dairying prospered on the cutover land as logging wound down in the early 1900s.

[14] During the Great Depression in the 1930s the People's Exchange Bank closed, and many locals lost their savings.