Door County Trip, Day #1
Sunday, October 8, 2023
Leaving Rochester, we decided to take the back roads to Door County, WI over the course of a couple of days. Our first stop was here, in Sparta, WI, at the FAST Fiberglass Mold Graveyard. This is one of the companies that makes the fiberglass structures we see every day, but seldom give much thought. Those iconic muffler men and Paul Bunyan statues dotting Route 66; the fiberglass slides at pools, and all the strange animals and business logos that are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, all come from a place like this. Here at the graveyard, they have some of the old fiberglass structures themselves, but this appears to primarily be for the molds used in the construction of the fiberglass items.
The baseball glove above, and this male pheasant, are a couple of the completed fiberglass structures they have on display. However, as you will soon see, most of the times in the graveyard are not completed structures, but instead the molds used to build these final products.
Here is one of the typical molds. You can see, unlike the finished product, the mold has a line down the center of the devil’s face with bolts holding the two halves together. It would be interesting to see this process in action and understand better how they use these molds to fashion the final product.
I would have to imagine this mold made something for an amusement park somewhere.
Unlike the finished products, which are smooth, shiny, and nicely painted, the molds are all a drab gray color. If you come here thinking this is a graveyard for the finished products you will be disappointed. Although there are a few of those dotting the property, most of the things on display are these old gray molds.
This is the classic muffler man pose, with those outstretched hands; however, the face on this one is not the one commonly seen on the old muffler men.
Bob’s Big Boy anyone…..?
These things go on and on for rows and rows over multiple acres. It is nice that they let the public just stroll around and look.
I concentrated on photos of the things that were clearly identifiable; however, as you can see in the background there are so many others that are just random pieces that are more or less identifiable as to their purpose.
If you have ever been to Marquette, IA, they have a riverboat casino called the Casino Queen that sits permanently docked in the Mississippi. This is some type of a throwback to when gambling joints could not be on dry land, but they could be on riverboats. Anyway, out in front of their building is a pink elephant and I am rather sure this was the mold that must have been used to create that elephant. I will put a map link below to the street view of the elephant in Marquette and you can see what you think - same mold???? When we make our trip down the Mississippi River I will get some photos of that elephant.
The orcas and what appear to be traffic cones are some of the few finished products that are painted and not the molds. In the background, there appears to be a slide that was likely at some water park.
These too are a couple of the finished products that have been retired here. These two are a tribute to the Brooklyn and LA Dodgers.
Out in front of what appears to be the manufacturing building was this yellow lab statue which was bright and shiny and waiting to be delivered to its new home.
Our next stop was Warrens, WI where they claim to be the cranberry capital of Wisconsin. They had their big annual cranberry festival just a few weeks ago and this is prime cranberry harvest time.
We made a point to visit the Cranberry Discovery Center and shared a cone of cranberry ice cream. It was good, but if we are being truthful, it wasn’t great in our opinion.
Inside the store, there is everything cranberry.
These are the cranberry bogs flooded for harvest. Check out the map below that shows the satellite view of these bogs.
Driving through the area we saw them building a bunch of new bogs. They dig out the center of the “field” to be a few feet below the surrounding ground level. They then put in the pipes and drainage infrastructure to allow for the annual flooding for harvest. Then, they fill the bottom with sand, as the cranberry vines appear to grow best in sandy soil. When the cranberries are ready for harvest they pump water into the bog from the surrounding ponds and lakes and because the berries are buoyant the water causes them to “pop off” the vines and float to the top of the water where they can be harvested. Here are the red cranberries floating on the water in the flooded bog. A fascinating sight I had never seen before.
The next stop was at the Stevens Point Sculpture Park. This is an eclectic collection of sculptures positioned along a nice nature walk. Some of the art, like this wolf made of steel rebar rods, is clearly recognizable; others not so much.
This “Auto” is made up of a bunch of random parts put together in a rather haphazard fashion. Sometimes I think I just lack the artistic intellect to get this stuff.
This was made of wood, and this is one where I can understand that it took real skill and know-how to put something like this together.
This close-up of the woven metal ring shows the detail and amount of work that went into such a creation.
This piece was about 6 inches off the ground and depicted a canoe being paddled by a number of these figures. The entire thing was probably 12-15 feet long. It appears to be made of steel.
We finished Day #1 with a nice stroll around Lake Joanis at the Schmeeckle Reserve. This is a very nicely maintained park with trails throughout. The setting sun and clouds made for a serene setting for a walk.
The deer seem to really like the Schmeeckle Reserve as well. This doe was grazing and didn’t seem too bothered by us. We also saw a nice 8 or 10-point buck earlier on the walk but I didn’t get a photo of him.
