Pig Iron & Morphine

How often do any of us have the chance to stand inside a beehive-shaped brick kiln (about three stories high) and listen to the coo of resident pigeons rustling around at the top? Not often, probably. You can do that at Fayette State Historic Park, right on the shore of a charming and tiny sub-bay of Green Bay with the equally charming name of Snail Shell Harbor. Next to the kiln is a massive husk of a stone building, the former pig iron foundry, long ago stripped of whatever equipment it had, but sporting enormous wooden beams supporting its ceiling. Where a lot of pigeons live.

That’s only a part of the site, since Fayette was a company town for a few decades and left behind a number of buildings. Some, like the former company hotel and the manager’s house, have been restored to pretty good shape, and others are the subject of ongoing restoration. The company store is now a three-story stone shell, the wooden parts long ago burned out, and it reminded me of a couple of the stone-wall church ruins I saw in Germany, make that way in World War II. Other buildings left even less behind: a rectangle of stones, or a sign that said something-or-other was here, but no more.

The kids found a beach make entirely of smooth stones. A limitless supply of rocks to the throw in the water! According to a sign, the site had formerly been a slag pile, and bits of unnatural-looking black rock were still easy to find, though I don’t know enough about pig iron smelting to know why rocks like that are part of the end result.

Their mother rested near where they were throwing rocks, and I wandered off to the manager’s house, up on a hill, and a neighboring middle-class worker’s house, probably one of the company clerks. Exhibits were sparse in that house, but there was one showing what had been discovered a few years ago inside one of the walls of the house: empty bottles and other items that indicated that a morphine addict had lived in the house. Maybe a border, the sign speculated, or maybe the woman of the house, who would have been able to order a discreet supply of the drug by answering ads in the likes of Godies Ladies Book.