Treasure Tales and Treasure Stories About Wisconsin from the Archives of Lost Treasure Magazine
Lost Beach
Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and Look behind the ranges.
Something lost behind the ranges.
Lost and Waiting for you.
Go!
-- Rudyard Kipling
From State Treasure Tales
By Anthony J. Pallante
From page 40 of the November 1997 issue of Lost Treasure magazine.
Copyright ©1997, 1998 Lost Treasure, Inc.
What's in a name? Sometimes quite a bit. For instance, the residential area at Pewaukee Lake known as the Beach Park subdivision was so named because it was built on the site of the former Waukesha Beach Park. From 1895, to 1949, the Waukesha Beach was the best patronized resort in the region. In its heyday, it boasted a picnic grove and an amusement park with a mile-long roller coaster as well as snack stands, fun houses, sight-seeing tours, two yacht clubs, a ballroom, a night club, and a hotel. Crowds at large at 30,000 showed up to watch fireworks and boat races and to hear the Andrews Sisters sing.
Today all that remains are some pilings where the tourist boats used to gather and the foundations of the park's concrete fountain, but anyone who can get permission to detect the area should be in for some treats. Scuba divers still find old beer and pop bottles in the area around the pilings, even though current residents remember dumping 100s of antique bottles into garbage trucks during a clean up campaign. Even though they have bulldozed and built on, the 67 acres on the south shore of Pewaukee Lake that were once Waukesha Beach must conceal some of the densest coin per cubic foot of dirt concentrations in the State of Wisconsin.
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