New Chicago, Wisconsin was renamed in 1885. What has it been called ever since?

Founded in 1880 in Trempealeau County, this village along the Buffalo River was named New Chicago. The town decided to identify its grain elevator, and started painting the word “ELEVATOR” on it. Before the painting was complete, winter arrived.

A grain elevator is a tall silo (typically higher than 100 feet) with a pit for grain to be dumped. A series of buckets (or a vertical conveyor belt) scoops the grain out of the pit, hauls it to the top of the structure, and dumps it in, to fill it from the top, as filling it from the bottom up poses obvious practical difficulties.

People new to the area saw the elevator with the letters “ELEVA” painted on the side and assumed that “Eleva” was the village’s name. Since 1885, a post office named “Eleva” has been in operation in the town.

Eleva has grown significantly since its inception, according to the US Census Reports. The population of the village—which occupies six tenths of a square mile, or 1.55 square kilometers—was only 319 people in 1910. The population has grown steadily through the decades, except for a decline of nearly 100 people between the 1980 and 1990 Censuses. As of the 2010 Census, it was 670.