Fox Cities News

Reconstruction of Menominee Park’s Pratt Trail has been underway since August, and scheduled completion will be delayed due to state-mandated archaeological work that is taking place at the site. In planning for the project, the city of Oshkosh engaged with the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM), the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Tribal Nations to ensure compliance with state laws that protect our state’s heritage, including archaeological sites. UWM has been active at the site since before the beginning of the road work. 

The project area is known to be coincident with an extensive pre-contact Native American village that dates from circa AD 900 to 1600. UWM identified evidence of this during the initial phase of work and before road work began. Through consultation with the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, as well as Tribal Nations, UWM developed a plan to ensure protection of these archaeological items of significance during the road construction work. During the plan implementation, which, in part, entailed on site monitoring of the existing road bed removal, UWM confirmed to the city of Oshkosh that the historically significant village site has been preserved intact beneath the road bed. The city of Oshkosh asks that visitors to Menominee Park respect the restricted areas of the park to allow the archaeological teams to complete their work, which is ongoing. The area is under surveillance to ensure compliance with federal law which forbids unauthorized entry. 

Numerous fall and winter events in Menominee Park are being relocated due to this ongoing project. Please check with event organizers for details on changes to their events. For more information about this archeological site, please contact Jennifer Haas, Director of the Archaeological Research Laboratory Center at UW Milwaukee, at (414) 251-8853. 

Original source can be found here.