Wisconsin Stories: We're Rockin'

The Baraboo Range is a huge, metamorphic ridge of quartzite imbedded in younger layers of sandstone and limestone. Quartzite is a hard, resistant metamorphic rock, formed from ancient sandstone and re-crystallized by heat and pressure to form a new mineral. The Western Granite Company excavated Baraboo quartzite starting in the 1890s. Quarries at Rock Springs and near Devil's Lake continue to crush the purplish stone for use in road building, along railroad lines, monument bases, furnace linings, and sandpaper grit.

Northern Wisconsin is underlain with layers of the igneous rock granite. Granite forms when molten rock cools and crystallizes slowly underground, forming a colorful, durable rock. In 1874-75, L. S. Cohn discovered a useful vein of the resilient stone ten miles north of Wausau. Cohn's lens of granite ranged in color from gray to reddish brown to bright red and extended in a broad belt about five miles on both sides of the Wisconsin River. First used for street paving stones, Cohn sold granite for use as grave markers, monuments, and for county buildings and banks in Wausau and throughout central and southern Wisconsin.

The Richter House's rough exterior and its graceful columns are both built with Montello granite.

Today's inactive Montello Granite Quarry serves as the heart of the Montello Historic Commercial District, just as it formed the center of the Montello community during its heyday from 1879 to 1976. Montello stone, prized for its extreme hardness, helped build monuments at Gettysburg National Park: a memorial to General George Custer, General Grant's tomb, and Wisconsin's Capitol—which some say outshines the nation's capitol in beauty and grandeur. By the time the company closed its doors for good in 1976, the quarry—which for a century served as Montello's major employer— had grown to more than 80 feet deep and stretched across nearly four acres. Today, the expanse is filled with water and serves as the backdrop for a small park, providing a vivid reminder of the Montello Granite Quarry's impact on the community.

SHSW Historic Preservation. Architecture and History Inventory. Nomination Master File:Marquette County, Montello. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Built of brownstone, the former Washburn Bank building is now home to the Washburn Historical Society Musuem.

From 1868 to 1898, the area around Bayfield and Washburn teemed with quarrying operations harvesting the brown sandstone found in a thin bed extending six to eight miles from the shoreline of Lake Superior. In those days, the Apostle Islands, now a National Park, supported seven separate quarrying operations. Lake vessels, docked alongside many of the quarries, loaded and shipped cargoes of up to 600 tons of undressed stone. The first brownstone taken from the site helped construct the new Milwaukee Courthouse in 1868 after the original building burned down. In the beginning, business was booming. However, the economic depression of 1873 hurt the industry, which received its deathblow from the fickle finger of fashion in the late 1890s, when lighter colored stone came in vogue.

SHSW Historic Preservation. Architecture and History Inventory . Nomination Master File: Bayfield County, Washburn. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Washburn Stone Quarry is 1.5 miles north of Washburn at Houghton. The quarry opened in the spring of 1885. It measured 100 feet wide by 75 feet long. See steam cutter in bed of quarry.

As Europeans and Americans began to explore what would become the state of Wisconsin, they learned about the region's rich rock and mineral resources from the Native American residents. Until the 1850s nearly all building stone was acquired from clearing land for farming or from easily accessible surface deposits. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, quarrying had become a major industry with a growing regional significance. Visiting these quarries today reminds us of the people who worked there and, by learning their stories we learn about ourselves.

Babcock and Smith Quarry. Lot 565 WGNHS collection fig. 3, plate XXIV Buckley: Ornamental Stone. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

A Lannon limestone bungalow with a Japanese motif.

During quarrying's heyday in Wisconsin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, limestone was the most heavily harvested stone. Limestone sits in a broad band that reaches across the southeastern quadrant of the state, runs along the Mississippi River Valley, and extends up the Door Peninsula. At that time, limestone provided everything from street curbing to lime. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Lannon (Waukesha County) formed the center of the limestone curbing industry, producing blocks that workers laid end-to-end to form curbs for streets. Limestone also served as building stone, paving stone, and rubble and gravel for roads. Of the many companies producing finished limestone, Lannon's gained a reputation as the finest on the market. For this reason, many buildings in Milwaukee and Chicago contain Lannon limestone. Limestone bedrock was also broken down into lime in 1600 degree Fahrenheit kilns and used in mortar, concrete, plaster, agricultural products, and for tanning and water purification.

SHSW Historic Preservation. Architecture and History Inventory. Nomination Master File: Milwaukee County, Wauwatosa. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

The Durand Free Library is built of Dunnville sandstone.

For thousands of years, people have been quarrying the light-colored sandstone found in the central region of the state. Archaeological investigations have revealed that between 600 C.E. and 1200 C.E. a group of Late Woodland Effigy Mound people lived in the section of the Red Cedar Valley. Approximately six centuries later, this region became the community of Dunnville. Native Americans used Wisconsin's sandstone to paint and carve powerful images that continue to hold important cultural and religious meaning today. They also used the sandstones for grinding and abrading tools. Immigrants flooded the state and Dunnville became a county seat in 1854, flourishing until the Knapp, Stout, & Company closed their operations in the 1890s. Several decades later the sandstone bedrock exposed along the banks of the Red Cedar Valley was quarried for building stone. The Mabel Tainter Memorial Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menominee provides a good example of the beauty of the stone and the skill of local craftsmen in finishing it.

SHSW Historic Preservation. Architecture and History Inventory. Nomination Master File: Pepin County, Durand. 315 2d Ave., Durand, WI. Not to be reproduced without written permission from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.