(water bubbling) - Menomonee Park or Lannon Quarry, which is the body of water as the locals know it.

This was a Lannon stone quarry, hit its heyday I believe in the mid to late 1800's.

And then somewhere after the turn of the century in the early 1900's, it just wasn't producing enough stone.

It was too expensive to run the pumps to keep the water out.

So they just kind of shut everything down.

And lo and behold, we're left with this somewhat beautiful body of water to play in.

You obviously have the rock ledges, which is unique.

So obviously most of those our normal lakes in the area are more of a kind of a bowl shaped.

Here we have much more structure from the mining days.

There are some, you'll see some remains from the mining days.

You'll see the cables running down.

There is at least one ore cart with its chassis next to it.

There is a collapsed shed, as well.

So we don't know whether it was a tool shed or what exactly it was used for.

We've always called it a tool shed because several years ago, we started finding some tools around what remains of that shed.

It's kind of look at lumber pile today.

But it's still kind of fun to explore that and just kind of maybe put the puzzle together in our head of what it must have looked like back in the day.

Quarry's always have an interest for divers because we have the ability of getting in and we can usually get depth fairly quickly.

One of the drawbacks with some of the inland lakes that we have in Wisconsin is, at least where the public launches are, where we can get access.

It is such a long swim to get out to any depth.

So the one nice thing about diving in a quarry is, because obviously most of these walls are pretty sheer, we can get in the water, get some depth relatively quickly, and actually be underwater exploring the deeper parts of the quarry.

Yeah, I can't even think of all the stories I've heard over the years.

So as a kid growing up I would come here and hang out, go fishing, go to the beach.

And then you hear all these stories.

But then as a diver, when I finally got certified, I actually did my initial training here.

I was so excited to explore the quarry to see what was really down here.

Well, it's a little deflating because the stories weren't true.

All that's really left, like we talked about is that tool shed, is that ore cart, some cables.

Oh, it's fantastic.

I mean, it makes history much more vivid, more real.

I mean, you can read about it in a book.

You can even maybe get lucky enough to see a black and white picture, but to be able to go underwater and see it in color and see what was left behind from back in the day when they were mining here.

10 hour days, six days a week.

It was not an easy life, but there was so much Lannon stone in this area, and it was a great industry for this area that this was where they came to work because there were jobs available.

(ethereal music plays)