During the last Wisconsin glaciation, the advance of the Grantsburg sublobe blocked drainage and formed Glacial Lake Grantsburg, and natural succession eventually created the extensive peat marshes now known as Crex Meadows. Before white settlement in the mid-1800’s, the Fox, Dakota, and Chippewa Indians used Crex extensively. Large-scale commercial drainage beginning about 1890 disrupted the entire ecological pattern. The Crex Carpet Company began vast operations there in 1911, harvesting and shipping the native wire grass, Carex stricta, from which Crex probably took its name, and for two decades this industry was economically important to the area. Though fully exploited, Crex endured, and under ownership of the State of Wisconsin, prescribed burning and water management are restoring its prairie flora and fauna.