About & History
There has been something on this spot for two hundred years — a trading post, a sheep farm, a bandleader's summer cabin and, for most of the last century, somewhere to eat and sleep.
Waubee Lake Lodge is six miles from Lakewood on the shore of a 116-acre lake inside the Chequamegon–Nicolet National Forest. Seventeen suites, seven cabins and lake houses, a restaurant, a full bar and a banquet hall.
The name comes from Waubeskibinas — White Eagle — a Chippewa chief who by most accounts lived beside this lake in the eighteenth century, drawn to the same things everyone since has been: heavy timber and good trout water running out of it.
What the lodge is now was built after fire damaged the original building in 2005. It changed hands again in 2026. The bones of the business, though, are old: a bar that opens at nine, a dining room that fills up on Friday whether or not anybody is staying the night, and a lake that people have been coming back to for longer than any of the buildings have stood.
A long time here
Two hundred years of owners.
Recorded owners and occupants of this stretch of shoreline, as the lodge tells it.
-
1700s
Waubeskibinas
The lake takes its name from the Chippewa chief known as White Eagle, who is thought to have lived alongside it for the forest and the trout streams feeding it.
-
early 1800s
The Toutelette brothers
Three brothers from France ran a trading post on this ground until the middle of the century, trading ammunition for venison that went on to restaurants. The site was somewhere between what are now Powers Lane and Waubee Park Lane.
-
late 1800s
The Everett family
The land changes hands and the first cabins go up, built for hunters and fishermen. The business has been roughly the same one ever since.
-
early 1900s
Sheep
For a stretch after the turn of the century the ground is farmed rather than let.
-
1930
Wayne King, the Waltz King
The bandleader buys the land and builds a cabin on the lake. He and his wife were keen water skiers, and by local account people around the lake spent their afternoons watching the pair of them. They sold to the federal government and left the north country in 1968.
-
Mid-century
Herman Kroger
The Kings' former caretaker leaves the job to open a tavern, incorporated to house the old Waubee Lodge. The lodge changes hands repeatedly over the next fifty years.
-
2005
Fire
The original building is damaged by fire. The lodge standing today is its replacement.
-
2009
Russ and Mary Kralovetz
The Kralovetzes buy the rebuilt lodge and run it for the next seventeen years. Regulars will still recognise their names on the menu.
-
2026
Darin Thompson
The lodge changes hands again — seventeen guest rooms, seven cabins, the bar, the dining room and the hall.