Stanley is a city in Chippewa and Clark counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 3,608 at the 2010 census. Of this, 3,602 were in Chippewa County, and 6 in Clark County.

Stanley was arranged and platted in 1881 later the Wisconsin Central Railroad built its extraction through the area. The town is named for Lemuel C. Stanley, a merchant and railroad man from Chippewa Falls who was involved in that first plat. The main to the front businesses were a small steam sawmill and some charcoal kilns built by the York Iron Company in 1887.

In 1891 the Northwestern Lumber Company from Eau Claire started a huge lumber mill at Stanley. Starting in the 1860s, Northwestern had sawed its lumber at its company town Porter’s Mills, on the Chippewa River four miles below Eau Claire. But by the early 1890s Northwestern had exhausted its holdings of timber simple to drive next to the river. Timber stands yet remained on land away from the rivers, so Northwestern switched its model from river-logging to railroad-logging, and shut all along Porter’s Mills. The company built a new mill at Stanley and spawned the Stanley, Merrill and Phillips Railway to haul logs out of the country to the north and south. (The railway never reached Merrill or Phillips; its furthest accomplish was Walrath, to the north of Jump River.) The mill in Stanley sawed wood until 1920, when Northwestern’s timber holdings in the area were largely exhausted. Over that period, the mill is estimated to have sawed 850 million board feet of lumber.

Through the 1890s the population of Stanley increased from 500 to 2500. Stanley became a village in 1895 and a city in 1898.^{[citation needed]} In 1897, attracted by rail contacts and the supply of hemlock bark, the U.S. Leather Company opened a tannery in Stanley which employed 200 men and by 1908 tanned 75,000 hides shipped in from Chicago to South America. Stanley’s other huge early industry was the huge Four Canning Factory upon the north side of town, where immigrant farmers brought wagonloads of peas, cabbage, corn and beets grown on the logging cutover. In 1914 enormous Four produced taking place to 100,000 cans of vegetables per day, shipping them all over the country.