The Waldemar Ager House at 514 W. Madison St. didn't used to be there.

The word "landmark" kind of implies a certain amount of permanence, right? Well, there are a number of long-time local institutions that didn't start out were we find them today. Such as ...

1. The Public Library

Years before it was officially a city, Eau Claire had a library. In 1860, a group of Eau Claire pioneers created a “library” that was kept in a case in the Mahler and Putnam store on Eau Claire Street. It wasn’t a truly public library, however: Membership was 50 cents and checking out a book for two weeks set you back a nickel. Today, the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library is free to everyone, and it hasn’t moved far in 154 years: It’s still on Eau Claire Street.

2. The Eau Claire County Courthouse

What’s now called Wilson Park in downtown Eau Claire – i.e., the place where Volume One hosts Chalkfest each August – was the site of Eau Claire County’s first courthouse, a wood frame building built in 1862. The second courthouse was built a decade later near the site where the current 1970s-era courthouse and 2010s-era jail now stand on Oxford Avenue.

3. Sacred Heart Hospital

The Hospital Sisters of St. Francis opened their first hospital inside the home of Mrs. J. Fitzpatrick on Putnam Street in 1889. The following year, a proper hospital was built on North Dewey Street. Unlike the previous structures on this list, this building still stands: The Colonial/Neo-Gothic revival structure in now part of the Eau Claire Academy, an adolescent treatment center.

4. The Waldemar Ager House

Norwegian immigrant Waldemar Ager was a noted author and journalist in late 19th- and early 20th-century Eau Claire. In 1902, he bought a Victorian-style cottage at the corner of Chesnut and Whipple streets. It eventually became a Luther Hospital resale shop. When the hospital expanded in the 1990s, it donated the house to the Waldemar Ager Association, which moved it a few blocks to 514 W. Madison St., where it can be visited today.

5. The Chippewa River


OK, this one is sort of a trick answer, but it’s true. Sometime in the distant past, the Chippewa River decided to take a shortcut, leaving one of its bendiest bends behind, forming an oxbow lake. What we now call Half Moon Lake was cut off from the rest of the river.