High Cliff State Park is home to several archaeological sites, including spectacular effigy mounds and lime kiln ruins. The park gets its name from the high cliff of the Niagara Escarpment. The rocky escarpment is made of limestone. It has been home to humans for over 14,000 years.

From the cliffs, visitors can see for miles…all the way across Lake Winnebago! Lake Winnebago is part of the great water route between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. Its waters have been sailed by dugout canoes, French Voyageurs, steamboats, and modern tourists

The spectacular cliffs and the springs that flow from them drew Woodland Period (500 BC-AD 1200) peoples to the escarpment. They built burial mounds in the form of water spirits on the top of the cliff.

The limestone in the cliff breaks easily into flat slabs. Native residents took advantage of this. While most other effigy mounds in Wisconsin are built only of earth, the mounds here are built out of a mix of earth and stone.

At one time, a string of 30 or more burial mounds ran along the top of the cliff for a distance of nearly a mile. Most of the mounds were destroyed when Europeans arrived and quarried the limestone under them away. Only six effigy mounds, two conical mounds, and one oval mound survived.

Today, the surviving mounds sit beside a hiking trail in the level woods on the top of the cliff. Signs alert visitors to their presence.

The signs by the mounds use modern terms such as “Panther” and “Buffalo”. The ‘panther’ mounds actually represent powerful, long-tailed water spirits. Native American oral tradition identifies Lake Winnebago as the home of one such water spirit. What their builders meant the little effigies now called ‘buffalo’ to be, we may never know.

Many such water spirit effigies were built on the Niagara Escarpment. These are some of the largest effigy mounds in Wisconsin. Their tails can be hundreds of feet long.

The water spirit’s tail has been highlighted here. It stretches over 200 feet into the distance, down the trail to the body of the water spirit.

Not all of the mounds at High Cliff are effigies. Two round or ‘conical’ mounds survived as well, next to one of the water spirit effigies. This simple mound type is the most common in Wisconsin.

Nearby, on the other side of the trail, is an oval or short linear mound. Between AD 700-1200, the people of Wisconsin built burial mounds in many different forms—effigies, conicals, linears, and other geometric shapes.

Europeans valued the Niagara Escarpment for its limestone. The highest quality limestone near the top of the cliffs was turned into lime for cement and plaster. The layers below were used to make brick mortar. Quarries and lime kilns operated here between 1855 and 1956. Big sections of the cliffs were dynamited into rubble.

The ruins of a set of lime kilns at the base of cliffs are located along another trail in the park, near the bottom of the cliffs. These stone structures are all that is left of a large industrial complex belonging to the Western Lime and Cement Company.

These concrete supports are all that is left of a rotating rock crusher. After sections of the cliff were blasted into pieces, men broke up the rock with pick axes and loaded it into mechanical crushers to be broken up even further.

The crushed limestone was fed into these furnaces and ‘cooked’ until it turned into quicklime powder.

Working in the furnaces must have been a hot, exhausting, and stifling job. The fires needed to be stoked with wood and coal and heated to over 2200 degrees Fahrenheit before lime could be made.

Piles of waste lime were dumped on the slopes below the kilns. Even after nearly 70 years, the white and barren lime dumps are still easy to spot.

Today, lime production has ceased, leaving these lonely ruins behind. The company store, however, still stands and is in use—as a museum where park visitors can learn more about this vanished industry.