Historic Indian Agency House

Historic sites have a unique way of keeping the lessons of the past before our faces in the present. In 1832, a house was constructed at a dynamic crossroads of geography, culture, and history. It was a time of pivotal change, uncertainty, and critical decisions as decades of accumulating tensions came to a head — the consequences of which have reverberated through nearly two centuries. The house erected at the ancient travel corridor of the Fox-Wisconsin portage was the Fort Winnebago Indian Agency built for John H. Kinzie, Indian sub-agent to the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Nation. It exists today as one of the few surviving reminders of that weighty period of the past. The powerful stories embodied by this historic site are ones we cannot afford to forget. The house was opened as a nonprofit museum in 1932.