Shot Tower and the Helena Cemetery

Before I get to all the pictures I took in Louisville last week here's a fall hike I was able to do at Spring Green.

Every time I've tried to get out of the car in Spring Green a horde of mosquitoes descended upon me so I knew I had to wait for late fall to walk around unmolested at Tower Hill State Park.  There is a reason that you won't see any campers parked there in the nicer months!  There is some good history there though and all the information to follow I got from the state park's website.

At the top of Tower Hill is the location of an old shot tower.  In 1830 Daniel Whitney recognized it as an opportunity for construction of a tower for making the lead pellets used in shotguns. Whitney hired Thomas Bolton Shaunce, a lead miner from Galena, Illinois to dig a shaft from the top of the bluff to the level of the river below. Shaunce arrived in 1831 and spent 187 days over the next two years digging the 120-foot-deep shaft and the 90-foot tunnel between the shaft and the riverbank so that the shot tower could be built.

It's a steep climb up the trail, but not a long one.  All the connecting trails to and around the shot tower are only a total of 2 miles combined.  I don't say I even hiked a mile myself that day.

A smelting house was built at the top of the tower and a finishing house at the bottom to complete the buildings.

The method used was the “Watts Method” named after an English plumber who, watching raindrops fall, envisioned droplets of melted lead falling in the same manner and becoming round as they fell. The process was simple. Lead, brought from Mineral Point or Galena in 75-pound bars called “pigs,” was melted in large kettles at the smelting house. Arsenic was added to make it brittle and to help it form into droplets. The melted lead was poured through a ladle with holes in the lid and dropped into a pool of water. The droplets cooled and became round as they fell. The size of the holes in the ladle determined the size of the shot and the larger the shot, the farther they had to fall.

When the pool was full, the lead was hauled to the finishing house to be dried, polished, graded and sorted to be bagged for shipment to Eastern markets.

When in full operation, a crew of six operated the shot tower, dropping up to 5,000 pounds of lead per day. Of this, only about 600 to 800 pounds was usable shot. The rest was hauled back to the top of the tower, melted and dropped again.

This was the beginning of a flurry of growth and prosperity that lasted for about 30 years as the shot making business flourished. In 1836 nearly half of Wisconsin's people were living in the lead mining region, leading to the establishment of the territorial capitol near Belmont. By the 1840s, southwest Wisconsin mines were producing more than half of the nation's lead. Wow, who knew?

The shot-making process continued until 1860 when the poor economy just before the Civil War made it no longer profitable. The equipment was sold, the buildings torn down or moved away and the shot tower was abandoned.

The village of Helena was built on the river's edge near the shot tower, but was torn down during the Black Hawk War, when the U.S. Army needed materials to raft its men and supplies across the river in pursuit of Black Hawk.

Undaunted, the villagers rebuilt Helena and persisted until 1860 when the shot tower closed. The community's final chapter came when the railroad passed Helena by and it simply ceased to exist.  However the graveyard across the road from the shot tower is still there, and descendants in the region are obviously continuing to use it.

With only a mile walked at the state park I thought wandering around the cemetery would give my legs a little more of a stretch, and I'm glad I did or I wouldn't have seen this festive display.  Has anyone else ever seen this done at a gravesite?

They are creative over there, one grave was adorned with a pair of shoes.  I'm sure there is a story there.

Some of those older headstones were holding up very well, and still getting visitors.

Some appeared to not be in English, and others were so worn it was difficult to make anything out at all.

I know some find graveyards sad or creepy, but I'm always fascinated by them and think they help create a snapshot of different times and what people lives were like.