The Beginning
The year is 1842. Wisconsin is still six years away from statehood. Towering pines blanket the virgin forests, lumbering is an infant industry, and settlers are only now reaching into the remote corners of the wilderness that stretch endlessly across the horizon. The precious element lead has been discovered in the rolling limestone hills of southwestern Wisconsin. For a new nation, still struggling for survival, the soft, bluish-grey substance represents a valuable commodity in the world market; perhaps more importantly, the veins of lead could help produce the bullets and other products with which Americans would tame the rugged land.
The opening of the mines attracted rowdy, tough, dangerous men whose job it was to wrestle the lead from the earth's grasp. From Wales and Ireland, Germany and Cornwall, and the American South miners spread into the lead district surrounding the pioneer outposts of Mineral Point, Dodgeville, Blue Mounds, and countless other small villages. At the height of the mining era, nearly forty thousand pounds of lead would be hauled each year to markets in Milwaukee, Dubuque, Chicago, and Galena.
Roads were cut through the dense forests over which the lead wagons would roll. Alongside the rutted paths another industry grew--saloons and roadhouses catering to the raucous appetites of the miners. These establishments had names like McKillips (near Ridgeway), the Messerchmidt Hotel (fice miles west of Dodgeville), and Markey's. There were over twenty-two saloons on the main route, called the Military Ridge Road, between Blue Mounds and Dodgeville, a distance of only twenty-five miles.
DRunken fist fights, robberies, clubbings, and murder were not uncommon along the Ridge Road. The immigrant miners were joined by various criminal elements, gamblers, and prostitutes to foment a way of life usually short and often fatal. Burial services for the unluckiest victims were informal. The corpse would be dropped unceremoniously into a convenient pit with a few hasty words mumbled over the departed's body.
For over two decades wagons carrying lead for the processing mills rolled down the Ridge Road. The saloons, bawdy houses, and inns thrived. But all that ended in 1857 when the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad completed a branch line into Mineral Point. Lead could be shipped out more easily by rail, and traffic along the Ridge Road declined. The notorious hangouts eventually closed down.
At the height of the mining era, however, wagon masters and wayfarers had more to fear than a chance meeting with a highwayman. Beginning about 1840 a series of bizarre, often puckish, and generally unexplainable encounters with ghosts and phantoms beset those who lived or worked along the Ridge Road. The small community of Ridgeway, halfway between what was then called Pokerville (now Blue Mounds) and Mineral Point, became the center of activities for what has come to be known as the Ridgeway ghost.
Note:The information used for this and many of the other Ridgeway pages is borrowed from Haunted Wisconsin, by Beth Scott & Michael Norman.