 Wadena was founded by John Swan and named after Wadena, Minnesota, a town Swan had recently visited and found pleasing.The name derives from an Ojibwa term meaning "little round hill".The town was situated along a north/south rail line constructed through Benton County in the 1880s, originally operated as the Chicago and Great Southern Railway and later as the Chicago and Indiana Coal Railway, the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad, and ultimately the Chicago, Attica and Southern Railroad which maintained the line until its abandonment in the 1940s.