Explore New Richmond
Your Complete Guide to Living in New Richmond, Wisconsin
The City Beautiful. A city of about 10,000 on the Willow River, settled in 1857, levelled by a tornado in 1899 and rebuilt within a year. Today it has a walkable downtown, five schools, Wisconsin's busiest general aviation airport, and Fun Fest every July.
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Welcome to New Richmond
New Richmond is a city in St. Croix County on the Willow River, which is dammed near the centre of town. The 2020 census counted 10,079 residents, up from 8,375 in 2010 and 6,310 in 2000 — it has grown steadily for a quarter of a century.
It began in 1857, when Hiram Foster led a group of settlers down from Vermont looking for virgin timber and built a sawmill on the riverbank. The settlement was called Foster's Crossing for its first few years, then renamed for Richmond Day, the land surveyor who platted it. Because Wisconsin already had a Richmond, it became New Richmond. The railroad arrived in 1871, connecting the town directly to St. Paul, and Irish, German, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants followed through the 1870s and 1880s.
Median household income is $88,157, above both the Wisconsin and national figures, and the median age is 36.8 — young for this part of the state. Just under a quarter of residents are under 18. The City of New Richmond handles services and permits.
Illustrative photo. Unsplash Licence — free for commercial use, no attribution required.
The Town That Built Itself Twice
You cannot understand New Richmond without this. On the evening of 12 June 1899, an F5 tornado cut a forty-six-mile path through St. Croix, Polk and Barron counties. Most of it ran through farmland. New Richmond took a direct hit.
Half the homes in town were levelled and the entire business district was destroyed. 117 people were killed, 111 of them here, more than 125 were injured and over 1,500 were left homeless. It remains the deadliest tornado in Wisconsin history and the ninth deadliest in the United States.
What happened next is the part locals will tell you about. With state and federal aid and a flood of donations, nearly every destroyed home and all but two of the businesses were rebuilt by the following winter. Main Street — Knowles Avenue — was back inside five months. The local history book is called They Built Their City Twice.
The New Richmond Heritage Center tells the story properly, and it is worth an hour if you are moving here.
Downtown, Dining and the Community Calendar
The downtown that went up after 1899 is the one still standing, and it remains the centre of things. Historic storefronts hold locally owned shops and services, and the dining scene has grown into a genuine draw of its own, including a small but active craft beverage scene.
Beyond the shops, the calendar keeps people turning up: live music, trivia nights, seasonal markets and art fairs run with the New Richmond Area Chamber of Commerce through the year, plus the Park Art Fair, a Cabin Fever Classic in winter and Hometown Holidays.
It is a downtown people actually use rather than drive past — which, for a city of ten thousand within reach of a metro area, is not a given.
Illustrative photo. Unsplash Licence — free for commercial use, no attribution required.
Fun Fest, Every July
Fun Fest is New Richmond's signature summer festival, run by the Chamber over four days in the heart of downtown each July. Live music, a food court, a beer tent, one of the better carnivals in the state, and a parade down Main Street.
The weekend spills outward into a tennis invitational and a slow-pitch softball tournament, and for those few days the whole city is given over to it. If you want one afternoon that shows you what living here is like, this is the one to come for.
Dates shift slightly year to year, so check the Chamber's event listing before you plan around it.
Schools and Family Life
The New Richmond School District runs five schools: three elementary schools — Starr, Hillside and Paperjack — plus New Richmond Middle School and New Richmond High School. St. Mary School provides a private elementary and middle option. Northwood Technical College also has a New Richmond campus, which is unusual for a city this size and useful if trades training or a two-year path matters to your family.
If school performance is central to your decision, we will pull the current Wisconsin DPI report card for the district and walk through it with you. Those numbers move year to year and you should be looking at the live ones rather than a summary on a webpage.
On housing, the median value of an owner-occupied home is around $269,000. Stock runs from established in-town neighbourhoods near the river to newer subdivisions on the edges, so there is genuine range at different price points — and it sits below Hudson and Somerset while offering more of a full-service town than the smaller villages.
The River, the Airport and Getting Around
Parks and trails follow the Willow River through the city, with walking and biking paths, ball fields, paddling and fishing access, and camping nearby.
The city also has something genuinely unusual for its size: New Richmond Regional Airport (KRNH), a general aviation field north of downtown that is the largest in Wisconsin by number of hangars — 123 — and first in the state for based aircraft, with more than 275. If you fly, or work in aviation, that is a real consideration.
On the commute, be realistic: downtown St. Paul is about forty-five minutes and thirty-nine miles, with Minneapolis around forty-five miles. Highway 65 runs north–south through town and Highway 64 east–west; you pick up I‑94 at Hudson. If you are comparing options, we keep full guides to Hudson and Somerset as well.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Thinking About a Move to New Richmond?
We are James & Karen Olsen, and we have worked the St. Croix Valley for years. If you want a straight answer on what a house here really costs, how the commute actually feels on a Monday, or how New Richmond compares with Hudson, start a conversation with us.
The data relating to real estate for sale on this web site comes in part from the Broker Reciprocity Program of the Regional Multiple Listing Service of Minnesota, Inc. Real estate listings held by brokerage firms other than Property Executives Realty are marked with the Broker Reciprocity logo or the Broker Reciprocity thumbnail logo (little black
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