Donald is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

(nearly a ghost town) located in the town of Pershing, Taylor County,

Wisconsin Wisconsin ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest of the United States. It borders Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michig ...

, United States, where the

Canadian National Railway The Canadian National Railway Company () is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN is Canada's largest railway, in terms of both revenue a ...

crosses County Highway M.

History

Donald was founded in 1903, where the Fountain-Campbell Lumber Company built a sawmill on the Eau Claire, Chippewa Falls, and Northeastern Railway (a.k.a. the Omaha). The community was named for Donald Campbell, the son of the president of Fountain-Campbell. Before that, the spot was called ''Fountain Spur'', for the other principal of that company. Donald had a boarding house for sawmill workers. A post office was established in 1904. Around 1905 the J.S. Owen Company built a line for the Wisconsin Central Railway crossing the Omaha line at Donald and heading northwest for

Superior Superior may refer to: *Superior (hierarchy), something which is higher in a hierarchical structure of any kind Places * Superior (proposed U.S. state), an unsuccessful proposal for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to form a separate state *Lak ...

- now part of the

. At some point, the Omaha RR set up a box car as Donald's depot. Donald grew to boast a school and a church. But after the timber near Donald was depleted around 1916, Fountain-Campbell shut down their sawmill there and moved it north of Ladysmith to Crane, where timber remained. With that, Donald began to dwindle. The Omaha Railroad stopped running in the late 1930s and track was pulled up. The post office closed in 1942. As of 2023, only a few homes and the Canadian National remained.

Notes

Unincorporated communities in Taylor County, Wisconsin Unincorporated communities in Wisconsin {{TaylorCountyWI-geo-stub