There is a tendency to think of the history of Star Lake as beginning in 1894, with the arrival of the railroad, the construction of the sawmill, and the development of a company town based upon the logging industry. And in the often used sense that history is a written record, the history of Star Lake does begin in 1894. But we know that Europeans had been in the area before that, as surveyors (someone had to have laid out the railroad line before it was build in 1894, someone had to have known that there were trees worth cutting), trappers, fishermen, and the like. Somehow the lake had been named in the early 1880's (see Name), and it seems likely that whoever named it had seen it. Before that Native Americans called the area home.
Before the arrival of humans natural forces wrought great change upon the land; the greatest of these was the glaciers. Fire, climate change, the successions of plants and animals all shaped the landscape we see today, and which now constitutes Star Lake.
The subdivisions selected for this webpage, listed on the left, are arbitrary, but they do show the major eras of prehistory and history of Star Lake.
A list of Official State of Wisconsin Historical Markers in Vilas County is included in the article on Vilas County.