MILL RD

MILL RD

Jefferson

Palmyra

1910

2018

dam/lock

NA (unknown or not a building)

Concrete

No

The existing structure is a concrete buttress dam that appears to have been constructed in the early twentieth century. It is approximately 20 feet wide with three buttresses and four small, metal, hand-operated gates. Above the dam is a steel plate catwalk. The spillway is an open gravity chute with board-form concrete walls, parts of which have completely deteriorated and washed away. Immediately upstream and south of the dam is a second, narrower concrete-walled spillway controlled by a small concrete structure with two gates. This formerly was a mill race, with a mill first constructed at this site around 1850. No mill buildings are extant. By 1929, mill operations had ceased and the water wheels had been removed. The channel now carries water into a metal culvert pipe just downstream of the gates. Prior to 1929, what is currently the primary spillway was a wasteway for flood waters and there were much larger gates between the buttresses. They were removed and replaced by concrete walls with the small notches and hand-operated gates present today. In addition, the mill race previously had three head gates, not two, with that change occurring sometime after 1929.

Steinmetz, Geo. P., memorandum regarding the partial failure of the Spring Lake Dam, April 1, 1929, on file with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources; The History of Jefferson County, Wisconsin (Chicago: Western Historical Company, 1879), 529.

Not Listed