Later History
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. 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.
In 2006 parts of a horror film called Witches' Night were filmed within the state park.
Read more about this topic: Tower Hill State Park
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“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)