Tower Hill State Park | |
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IUCN category V (protected landscape/seascape) | |
Location | Iowa, Wisconsin, United States |
Coordinates | 43°8′48″N90°2′55″W / 43.14667°N 90.04861°W Coordinates: 43°8′48″N90°2′55″W / 43.14667°N 90.04861°W |
Area | 77 acres (31 ha) |
Established | 1922 |
Governing body | Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources |
Shot Tower | |
Location | SE of Spring Green in Tower Hill State Park |
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Built | 1831–1833 |
NRHP reference No. | 73000080 |
Added to NRHP | April 3, 1973 |
Tower Hill State Park is a state park of Wisconsin, United States, which contains the reconstructed Helena Shot Tower. The original shot tower was completed in 1832 and manufactured lead shot until 1860. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. [1] [2] The park abuts the Wisconsin River and is bordered by state-owned land comprising the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway.
The bluffs along the Wisconsin River are formed of Jordan Sandstone. The park lies within the Driftless Area, a region of the American Midwest that remained ice-free through three successive ice ages. [3] In the 19th century the Wisconsin River flowed directly past the base of the bluffs. The river has since shifted slightly, and a stream known as Mill Creek marks the northern boundary of the park.
Shot towers harness the effects of surface tension on liquids in free-fall, a technique developed in 1782. Molten lead can be poured through a strainer at the top of a tower or shaft. The droplets become spherical as they fall and cool in this shape during their descent. The pellets are caught in a water basin to break their fall and finish cooling.
In 1830 a businessman from Green Bay, Wisconsin, named Daniel Whitney was traveling along the Wisconsin River and recognized a sharp bluff near the town of Helena as a promising location for a shot tower. Lead deposits had recently been discovered in several locations around Iowa County. From the top of the bluff there was a 60-foot (18 m) sheer drop, below which the sandstone cliff sloped down to the riverbank, 180 feet (55 m) below the clifftop. Whitney formed the Wisconsin Shot Company with some other investors, and set his employee John Metcalf to oversee construction. [4]
The 60-foot (18 m) cliff was a convenient headstart, but Metcalf needed someone to continue a shaft for the remaining 120 feet (37 m) to ground level. Access to the bottom of the shaft, where the lead shot would be collected, necessitated a 90-foot (27 m) horizontal tunnel. In 1831 Thomas B. Shaunce, a 22-year-old lead miner in Galena, Illinois, was hired for the task.
Shaunce worked mostly alone but received some assistance from a friend named Malcom Smith. They dug with pickaxes and a gad, using gunpowder to loosen the harder rock of the lower layers. Shaunce used a plumb-bob to ensure that he was keeping the shaft perfectly straight, and a windlass to haul out the broken rock. Shaunce calculated where to begin digging the horizontal tunnel by standing across the water and sighting with his rifle directly below the top of the shaft. He dug in from the riverbank, using a line of stakes to maintain his alignment. When he first broke through from the horizontal tunnel to the bottom of the shaft, a blast of air knocked Shaunce unconscious and collapsed one of his lungs. [5]
The project took 187 working days, interrupted in the spring of 1832 when Shaunce and Smith both returned to Galena and enlisted in the Illinois Militia to fight in the Black Hawk War. Shaunce had been contracted to be paid $1000 for his work, but was ultimately offered land instead. [5]
A smelting house was built at the top of the cliff, and the 60-foot (18 m) drop from there to the opening of Shaunce's tunnel was enclosed with a wooden shaft. A finishing house was built on the riverbank, where the shot was dried, graded, and sorted. This was joined by a warehouse and docks. [6] In 1836 Whitney sold the property to a group of businessmen from New York for $10,000. [7] Later Cadwallader C. Washburn and a business partner purchased the site. [4] In 1852 they replaced the finishing house and installed steam-operated equipment, nearly doubling the operation's productivity. [7] The shot tower was operated by a crew of six, producing between 600 and 800 pounds of quality shot per day. Miscast pieces were melted and reused. The finished shot, graded by size, was transported to Milwaukee and then shipped east. [3]
Operations ceased in 1860 during an economic downturn, and the buildings and equipment were sold away. The village of Helena was abandoned soon after. Thomas Shaunce died around 1860 as well. Throughout his life he experienced respiratory trouble from the air blast in the tunnel, and felt he had been cheated of his proper payment. [5]
Historians have noted that the Helena Shot Tower, which allowed a frontier resource to be shipped in a finished form, was significant in the settlement and prosperity of southwestern Wisconsin. [4] [6] The overland teamster route developed to transport the operation's output to the east evolved into a road and then a rail line. Returning wagon teams brought supplies and immigrants. [7] Southwestern Wisconsin, once more closely tied to the Southern United States via the Mississippi River, built a population and culture closer to the northeast. [4]
In 1889 the site was purchased for $60 by the prominent Unitarian minister Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a member of a well-known Welsh-American family in the region. He created a recreational and educational retreat called the Tower Hill Pleasure Company, which provided outdoor recreation, visiting lecturers, books, and music. The retreat grew to include 25 cottages, as well as a dining pavilion, tennis courts, and other structures. One 1894 lecturer, a history professor, spent his free time excavating the shot tower's shaft and recovered several pieces of equipment which Lloyd Jones donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society. [4] In 1911 Jones' nephew Frank Lloyd Wright began building his studio Taliesin on a neighboring hill.
After Lloyd Jones died in 1918 his wife Edith donated the site to the state, and Tower Hill State Park was officially created in 1922. The smelting house and wooden shaft were rebuilt between 1970 and 1971 by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Wisconsin Historical Society. [8]
In 2006 parts of a horror film called Witches' Night were filmed within the state park. [9]
Tower Hill State Park is open from May to October. Visitors can enter several historical structures. The smelting house contains exhibits about the construction and use of the shot tower. Structures remaining from the Tower Hill Pleasure Company include the pavilion (now the park's picnic shelter), a gazebo, and the foundation of a barn. There are two miles (3 km) of trails leading up to the tower and down to the riverbank, where visitors can enter the horizontal tunnel to the bottom of the shaft. There is a small campground with 15 campsites, drinking water, and pit toilets. Nearby attractions include Taliesin, the American Players Theatre, the House on the Rock, and Governor Dodge State Park.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements of the twentieth century, influencing architects worldwide through his works and hundreds of apprentices in his Taliesin Fellowship. Wright believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was exemplified in Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture".
Herculaneum is a city in Jefferson County, Missouri, United States, and is a suburb of St. Louis. The population was 4,273 at the 2020 United States Census. The City of Herculaneum was the first county seat of Jefferson County from January 1, 1819 to 1839. The city celebrated its bicentennial throughout 2008.
Columbus is a city in Columbia (mostly) and Dodge Counties in the south-central part of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 5,540 at the 2020 census. All of this population resided in the Columbia County portion of the city. Columbus is located about 28 miles (45 km) northeast of Madison on the Crawfish River. The Columbia County portion of the city lies within the Madison Metropolitan Statistical Area while the Dodge County portion is a part of the Milwaukee-Waukesha-Racine CSA. Nearly all of the city is located within the town of Columbus in Columbia County, though a small portion lies within the town of Elba in Dodge County.
Spring Green is a village in Sauk County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 1,628 at the 2010 census. The village is located within the Town of Spring Green.
Taliesin, sometimes known as Taliesin East, Taliesin Spring Green, or Taliesin North after 1937, was the estate of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An extended exemplar of the Prairie School of architecture, it is located 2.5 miles (4.0 km) south of the village of Spring Green, Wisconsin, United States. The 600-acre (240 ha) property was developed on land that originally belonged to Wright's maternal family.
Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and studio in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959 at the age of 91. Today it is the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
The Driftless Area, a topographical and cultural region in the American Midwest, comprises southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and the extreme northwestern corner of Illinois.
The Jackson Ferry Shot Tower is a 75-foot (23 m) tall tower used for manufacturing lead shot located in Wythe County, Virginia and now adjacent to the New River Trail State Park, a lineal rail trail park connecting the historic towns of Pulaski and Galax, Virginia.
Shining Brow is an English language opera by the American composer Daron Hagen, first performed by the Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin, April 21, 1993. The libretto is by Paul Muldoon, and is based on a treatment co-written with the composer. The story concerns events in the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hagen invited Muldoon to write the libretto while the two were both in residency at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire during the summer of 1989.
Helena is an unincorporated community in the town of Arena in Iowa County, Wisconsin, United States. In the 19th century Helena was a village that played an important role in the manufacture and shipping of lead shot. The buildings of Helena played a key role in the Black Hawk War of 1832, despite being abandoned at the time.
The Gogebic Range is an elongated area of iron ore deposits located within a range of hills in northern Michigan and Wisconsin just south of Lake Superior. It extends from Lake Namakagon in Wisconsin eastward to Lake Gogebic in Michigan, or almost 80 miles. Though long, it is only about a half mile wide and forms a crescent concave to the southeast. The Gogebic Range includes the communities of Ironwood in Michigan, plus Mellen and Hurley in Wisconsin.
Duey and Julia Wright House is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed Usonian home that was constructed on a bluff above the Wisconsin River in Wausau, Wisconsin in 1958. Viewed from the sky, the house resembles a musical note. The client owned a Wausau music store, and later founded the broadcasting company Midwest Communications through his ownership of WRIG radio. The home also has perforated boards on the clerestories "represent the rhythm of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony Allegro con brio first theme." A photograph showing the perforated panels is in the web page on the National Register application.
Daniel Whitney was an early entrepreneur in territorial Wisconsin, whose businesses were responsible for much of the early development of that state in the period between the War of 1812 and statehood. He was the first "Yankee" to settle in Green Bay. He was the first to start many of the type of business ventures that the state became known for, such as the first lead shot tower and the first saw mill on the Wisconsin River. He was the private founder of the town of Navarino, a direct forerunner to the municipality of Green Bay. He died in 1862 in the home he lived in for over 30 years in Green Bay.
Galena is an unincorporated community in Lawrence County, South Dakota, United States. It is often considered to be a ghost town, even though a few families still live in the area. It is not tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Cherney Maribel Caves County Park is a county park located near Maribel in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. The park occupies 75 acres along the West Twin River. Cherney Maribel Caves consists of eleven caves along a rugged cliff line that runs parallel with the West Twin River. Maribel New Hope Cave, Tartarus Cave, Sinkhole Cave and Split Rock Cave are all established gated caves that need guides to visit the entire caves, they are gated due to past vandalism to the Speleothems and protect the current Speleothems.
The Riverview Terrace Restaurant, also known as The Spring Green Restaurant, is a building designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953 near his Taliesin estate in Wisconsin. He purchased the land on which to build the restaurant as, "a wayside for tourists with a balcony over the river." Construction began the next year, with the roof being added by 1957. The building was incomplete when he died in 1959, but was purchased in 1966 by the Wisconsin River Development Corporation and completed the next year as The Spring Green restaurant. In 1968, Food Service Magazine had an article about the newly opened restaurant:
... [W]hen a restaurant is designed by such a giant in his profession as the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it's important to find out what makes it a thing of beauty—to analyze in detail the elements of its design and appointments in search of principles that can be applied to food service facilities elsewhere.
No one in the past century has influenced architecture as an art and science more profoundly than Frank Lloyd Wright. Basic to his philosophy of "organic" architecture was the tenet that a building and its environment should be as one—that the structure, through proper blending of native materials and creation of appropriate linear features, should be in perfect harmony with its surroundings.
"Organic architecture comes out of nature," Wright said in a Food Service Magazine interview shortly before he died. He believed that each detail of the architecture and interior should be related to the building's overall concept. Each design element should reflect the whole environment, as opposed to having each design component reflect a separate idea all its own. ...
The Spring Green is a very subtle structure. It does not impose brash neon signs or harsh vertical lines upon an essentially horizontal rolling countryside. The structure is built, for the most part, only of those materials that come from the vital riverscape which is the site of the restaurant.
Wright's disciple, William Wesley Peters ... observes, "The building and its forms arise from the use of natural materials to their specific properties. For example, the rich, buff-colored limestone was quarried only a few miles away. It was laid in great horizontal courses with long, thin, projecting ledges that symbolically represent the character and quality of the stone at the quarry."
The Hillside Home School II was originally designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1901 for his aunts Jane and Ellen C. Lloyd Jones in the town of Wyoming, Wisconsin. The Lloyd Jones sisters commissioned the building to provide classrooms for their school, also known as the Hillside Home School. The Hillside Home School structure is on the Taliesin estate, which was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. There are four other Wright-designed buildings on the estate : the Romeo and Juliet Windmill tower, Tan-y-Deri, Midway Barn, and Wright's home, Taliesin.
The Romeo and Juliet Windmill is a wooden structure designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the town of Wyoming, Wisconsin. The building is on the Taliesin estate and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
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