With the coming of the Milwaukee, Menomonee Falls and Western (Bug Line) Railroad in 1890, a quarry was built on the southwest corner of Waukesha Avenue and Main Street in what was called Templeton back then.
The limestone quarry’s three lime kilns were the skyscrapers of Sussex/Templeton, 35-foot high furnaces built of stone and fire brick.
Gondolas filled with limestone were winched up inclined railroad tracks from the quarry floor to the top of the kilns on railroad flat cars to feed the stone into the white-hot kilns.
Twenty feet below the kiln tops were fire holes where workers would feed in cords of wood to burn the stone until they were molecularly transformed over a three-day period from hard rock limestone into lime chunks.
At the base of each kiln was a draw hole where the finished product was removed with long hooks and crowbars. After they cooled, the lime chunks could be pulverized to a fine powder.
The lime powder was used in the mortar that held bricks together, though it could also be used to make cement, whitewash or quicklime.
The limestone quarry was a huge business in old Lisbon before the invention of Portland cement. At its height, the Templeton Stone Co. employed as many as 50 workers earning from 12˝ to 15 cents an hour, while local farmers cleaned out their fence rows and wood lots to sell wagon loads of 4-foot long cord wood for the company’s kilns.
At noon, Tuesday, July 13, the lean-to sheds and worker platform floors caught fire around the kilns. The wind-driven flames soon set fire to the railroad trestle. Then the empty box cars next to the Bug Line went up, followed by massive piles of dry cord wood. The growing fire turned one of the workers’ flop houses to ash.
The conflagration drew townspeople and farmers to the scene to do what they could do with pails of water. Neither Sussex, Templeton or Lisbon had a fire department in those days, so someone telephoned Menomonee Falls and Waukesha to send fire pumpers.
The first to respond was the Menomonee Falls Fire Co., which sent a flat car loaded with firefighters and a pumper down the Bug Line tracks.
As the newspaper told it, “An engine and flat car brought the MF engine to Templeton in 8 minutes.” Some fudge factor went into that number, however, because the Falls spur was about 6.3 miles away. To arrive in 8 minutes, the engine pulling the loaded flatcar would have had to average 54 miles per hour the whole way.
The Falls firefighters helped put out the fire, but not before it had consumed all it would burn. A change in wind direction and velocity also helped, as did local townspeople and farmers.
The Waukesha fire company showed up a half-hour later, but the fire was under control by then, so they never unloaded and returned to Waukesha on the Soo Line Wisconsin Central Railroad tracks.
Before it burned itself out, the fire threatened to blow up a dynamite storage bunker. The bunker boasted 3-foot thick mortared stone walls with a thin arched flat stone roof, so that if the explosives were set off, they would blow up through the roof rather than out the sides. Fortunately, the fire never penetrated the bunker’s iron door.
When they heard about the fire, the Chicago owners of the quarry/kiln complex took the Soo Line Railroad to Sussex. When they got there the following day, they promised to rebuild. They also donated $58 to the Menomonee Falls Fire Co. as a gesture of thanks.
Rebuild they did, only to have it burn down again in 1916. The Kraemer family of Richfield bought the burned out abandoned quarry and lime kilns two years later for $500. Together with some investors from Sussex, they began the Mammoth Spring Canning Co. in 1920.
The last remains of the old cannery, a massive hill of crushed rock that neighbors dubbed “Mount Sussex,” were recently removed by the site’s future developer, Bielinski Homes.
If the developer’s planned condos ever do go up, they will look over a water-filled former quarry that is now full of fish.