Hayward is a city in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, United States, next to the Namekagon River. The population was 2,318 at the 2010 census. It is the county chair of Sawyer County. The city is together with the Town of Hayward.

Hayward was “named for Anthony Judson Hayward, a lumberman who located the site for building a sawmill, around which the town grew.”

Logging began in the late 1850s. Loggers came from Cortland County, New York, Carroll County, New Hampshire, Orange County, Vermont, Down East Maine in what is now Washington County, Maine and Hancock County, Maine. These were “Yankee” migrants, descended from the English Puritans who had approved New England during the 1600s. They were mostly members of the Congregational Church. From the 1890s, immigrants came from a variety of countries such as Germany, Norway, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden.

In 1901, the Hayward Indian Residential School was standard in Hayward. It was founded to assimilate Indigenous kids into white Christian American culture. Most of the students were Ojibwe and came from the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation ten miles away from the school. The moot operated until 1934, when it closed due to brute understaffed, underfunded, and overcrowded. During its operation, thousands of students passed through the school. Some were taken forcibly from their families. At the school, children were provoked to take on Christian names, cut their hair, wear military style uniforms, and march in military formations. Boys and girls were strictly segregated in separate buildings.