Retrospect: Old Mammoth Spring Hotel takes modern turn as sports bar
Killarney’s (earlier Dilly’s) tried to be a sports bar. Its new owner, Jim Wasley, has now taken the concept all the way with the renamed 4th Base on Main Sreet at Waukesha Avenue in Sussex, once the center of the old Village of Templeton.
Wasley bought the tavern July 24, then brought in as many as 20 employees at a time to perform extensive repairs and remodeling, and reopened it Aug. 4.
The story of this bar and grill began in 1887 with the anticipated arrival of the Wisconsin Central Railroad, which was laying tracks from the Fox River Valley south through Lisbon toward Waukesha.
On Oct. 19, 1887, the Waukesha World published this notice: “Mr. Fred Hummell of Hartford was in the village Saturday, trying to secure a lot on which to build a hotel.”
He was actually in east Sussex, which would shortly break away from the unincorporated Village of Sussex under the leadership of its founder and namesake, James Templeton.
Hummell made sure that the emerging Village of Templeton knew his name, and which side he was on, when the citizens of Sussex protested walking a mile to the new East Sussex, where Templeton had moved the former Sussex post office.
Sussex got its post office back, but Templeton kept his, too. And Fred Hummell gained not only the northeast corner of Waukesha Avenue and Main Street for his new hotel, but also the southeast corner, as well, for his home. (Hardee’s restaurant is there today.)
Initially, Hummell took advantage of a local attraction, Mammoth Spring, bubbling up on 13 acres south of Silver Spring Road, which some Milwaukee investors had recently purchased from William Weaver Sr.
Those investors wanted to cash in on the the spring water’s supposed medicinal benefits, notably an alleged cure for diabetes, then known as Bright’s disease.
Hummell named his establishment Mammoth Spring Hotel, hoping to attract the healing water’s “patients,” serving them with room and board and a tavern.
Fred Hummell, then in his 60s, also attracted a number of members of his extended family to Templeton.
The Waukesha Dispatch reported its Jan. 15 edition that the 75-year-old Fred Hummell had died at 11 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 13, 1897, at his homestead after a short illness.
Two hours later, his daughter, Mary Binderman of Peru, Ill., also died in her father’s home from the shock of his death and pneumonia, the paper said.
Fred’s body was shipped to Hartford for burial; Mary’s went to Peru.
New owners took over the hotel, and the extended Hummell family pulled out of Templeton.
Some of the new owners were the Tom and Jim McCluskey families, Stanley Stasieluk, Annie Brown and the Dave Perotti family. The building was transformed several times, once into an ice-cream shop and later into a grocery.
Soon after World War II, Bernie Krueger took ownership of the tavern-hotel-restaurant. The former Brook Hotel owner lured the Sussex Lions Club to leave that establishment as its headquarters and follow him to his new venture.
Krueger also attracted the Land O’ Lakes teams from Sussex to his tavern as they celebrated the 1950-51 basketball grand championship, with its trophies and banner ending up on his back bar.
A succession of owners followed Krueger’s departure. Mike and Della Gales opened it as Club Midel, featuring fine food. Don Laurence and Lacy Lauer tried it out as the Don Lucy Bar.
Others followed, until it became Club 74 and later Zimmerman’s. Bob Ische bought it in the 1980s, naming it Dilly’s. Dilly’s later became Killarney’s, its last incarnation before Wasley took it over.
The new establishment will face a newly resurfaced and widened Highway 74 and roundabout intersection with Main Street and Waukesha Avenue by the end of October, at least according to Wisconsin Department of Transportation officials.
Side note: A voters’ revolt in 1971 against Village President John Karnera led to the election of barkeeper Harold Tobin, who had thrown his hat into the ring just a couple of days before the election.
He served three years before he resigned, one of the shortest terms ever served by a Sussex village president.