Even in the new country, many distinct spellings were found.  Towns changed names as they grew.  When in its embryonic stage around 1851, the area that we now recognize as Algoma was first known as Wolf River.  The name Wolf River was changed to Ahnepee on 10 May 1859.  Ah-Ne-Pe is the Indian name for Gray Wolf.  The spelling changed from Ahnepee to Ahnapee in 24 January 1878.  Under Chapter 120, private and local laws of 1879, on 28 February, the village of Ahnapee was incorporated into a city.  On 7 September 1897 (by Ordinance #19 of 7 June 1897) it was renamed Algoma, an Indian word meaning, “park of flowers,” or “snow shoe.”

        It can be confusing to read town of Ahnapee in one place, or Ahnapee Township in another, or Ahnapee Town in yet another.  We tried to capture the name as it was written in the original document or record.

        The terms town and township are sometimes used interchangeably.  But in Wisconsin, the words are not identical.  The word town denotes a unit of government, while a township is a surveyor’s term describing the basic grid framework for legal descriptions of all land in the state to include land in cities and villages.  Originally, most towns and townships were six miles by six-mile squares, or thirty-six square miles, but natural and man-made boundaries, such as rivers and county lines, for example, caused some variation.  This township was then broken into thirty-six squares, like on a checkerboard, each a mile square.  This is what is called a section.  A section has 640 acres.  Although somewhat different from one area to another, and times of settlement, an immigrant applied to homestead a quarter section, or piece of ground one-half mile by one-half mile-square, or 160 acres.  Homesteaders in some areas also got another eighty acres, or an eighth of a section, if they promised to plant eighty acres of the total 240 in trees.

        Sections are numbered from one to thirty-six, starting in the northeast corner and snaking down.  So, you go from one to six on the first row, from east to west, then seven to twelve on the second row from west to east, and so on.  All other gradations after that are labeled by the corner of a unit.  So, for example, a twenty-acre piece could be labeled the northern twenty acres of a forty-acre parcel, which is the northeast forty acres of the southeast quarter section of section twelve in the Ahnapee Township in Kewaunee County.

        In a township, there would ideally be from 144 farmers at 160 acres to a farm, or ninety-six farmers at 240 acres per farm, to each farm to start out with.  The township was the political and social unit around which life revolved in those days. These 100 or so farmers would elect their township boards to determine policies on the school for the township, including roads, and bridges.  Townships were of more consequence in the early days than they are now, where most decisions are made at the county level today.

        A typical township would have seventy-two miles of roads crisscrossing through it, plus boundary roads of twenty-four miles (four sides x six miles) all around the township shared by the neighboring townships.  Once in awhile, the surveyors needed a hiccup to account for the situation that not all degrees of latitude maintain the same distance as the surveyor moves north.  This hiccup was established by laying out a line, which typically was a road and dividing line, called the Parallel, to get the surveyors back on target.

        In a few states patterned on New York state, the rural areas of a county are divided into civil towns.  It is phrased as, “town of ___________.”  Like townships in other states, towns had one-room schools, road and fence inspectors, and justices of the peace.  The boundaries of a civil town may or may not correspond to a federal land record township; in Winnebago County, Wisconsin only one of the sixteen towns is a regulation six miles square.

        Civil towns do not show on a Wisconsin state highway map.  Cities and villages with the same name as a civil town may exist within it.  Examples are: Oshkosh, Omro, and Winneconne.  There may also be unincorporated communities in a civil town.  These have no separate government.  Some are the remnants of old villages including discontinued post offices.

        There can be even more than one civil town in Wisconsin with the same name.  In addition to the town of Utica in Winnebago County, there is one in Crawford County also.  There are towns of Marshfield in Fond du Lac and Wood Counties.

        The sixteen civil towns in Winnebago County are Algoma, Black Wolf, Clayton, Menasha, Neenah, Nekimi, Nepeuskun, Poygan, Oshkosh, Omro (formerly Bloomingdale), Rushford, Utica, Vinland, Winchester, Winneconne, and Wolf River.1”