Stonehaven Ruins

The ruins of Stonehaven at Harrington Beach State Park are the remains of a vanished Wisconsin company town built around a Lake Michigan limestone quarry. From 1901 to 1925, the Lake Shore Stone Company operated a major dolomite quarry here, employing immigrants from Italy, Luxembourg and Austria and providing them with small worker cottages, bachelor barracks, a company store and other necessities of a self-contained industrial community. Today, the quarry has filled with water to become a 26-acre Quarry Lake, while stone foundations and old quarry structures remain scattered through the woods. The Stonehaven Historical Trail starts near the Ansay Welcome Center and leads visitors through the former community, making this one of the more unusual historic ruins in southeastern Wisconsin.

Stonehaven also has a darker chapter. On February 6, 1920, quarry worker Dominic Manna shot and killed fellow worker August Falcinelli on the quarry’s railroad tracks. Manna claimed he had accidentally discharged his double-barrel shotgun after tripping on an obstruction between the tracks, but investigators found that Falcinelli had been struck by two shots, including a fatal wound to the neck. There were no witnesses, and Manna was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder in Ozaukee County; the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1923. The historical marker at Harrington Beach describes the killing as a crime of passion as Manna had been in love with Falcinelli’s wife. It was the only murder in Stonehaven’s history. The exact crime scene is now part of the park’s historic landscape: the “Murder!” marker sits along the Stonehaven Historical Trail, near the former quarry and railroad corridor that once ran through the company town.

The Stonehaven ruins are inside Harrington Beach State Park at 531 County Road D in Belgium, Wisconsin. The park is open year-round from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. and requires a Wisconsin state park vehicle admission sticker. Today, the same landscape that once echoed with quarry blasts, machinery and trains is a 715-acre state park with Lake Michigan beach, hiking trails, wetlands, white cedar swamp and the flooded quarry.

Along the shoreline trail you’ll find the 3,000-pound anchor of the palace steamer Niagara that was recovered from the wreckage not far off shore from that spot. The Niagara sank on September 23, 1856 after a fire broke out onboard, killing more than 60 people.