In the early days of the Village of Wonewoc, this area was a center of industrial activity powered by the Baraboo River. Beginning with the original log dam and sawmill of the Willard brothers in 1851 and continuing to Arthur Gale’s Power House and Dam in 1917, the district was the site of later sawmills, improved dams, a tannery, lath and planing mills, gristmills, and flour mills. The Power House and Dam, removed in 1996, was one of the places from which Wisconsin Power and Light, later Alliant Corporation, traces its origins. The last flour mill, dating to the great boom in village development of the 1890s, was the massive three-story Wonewoc Mill Company structure that made White Swan Flour until fire destroyed it in 1927. With only concrete footings and scars along the bluff wall still showing where generations once carried out great and noisy labor, the area came to be known as The Lost District.