Building on history

Ray Ervin remembers the bones.

It was in the 1960s, and the former business manager of Laborers Local 113 was on the crew digging tunnels for the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s Oak Creek plant.

“We had a job on Pennsylvania Avenue in South Milwaukee where, every day, guys were hauling out fossils,” Ervin said. “I think they were little lizards.

“I know we found some buffalo bones and crystal deposits.”

Ervin also was on a job on Lisbon Avenue in Milwaukee in the late 1940s when crews ran a gas main straight through an old American Indian burial mound.

“That shut the job down for a long time until they figured it out,” he said.

Ken Gabrielse, executive vice president of Gabe’s Construction Co. Inc., Sheboygan, doesn’t recall actually digging up an American Indian burial mound in Door County in the late 1990s, but he remembers being prepared for it.

“We had a job where we were installing a gas main for Wisconsin Public Service, and they had an [American] Indian shaman with us so if we found any bones, he could give them the proper respect and blessing,” he said. “It was the only place we could go with the gas main.”

Mark Karow, president of Powers Lake Construction Co. Inc., Twin Lakes, was working a job on the west end of Lake Geneva when his crew hit a natural outcropping of copper.

“It weighs 40 pounds,” he said. “We still have it in our office as a door stop.”

The stories could go on and on. The fact is, whenever a contractor puts a shovel in the ground, there’s a good chance of finding something.

Most times, it’s just dirt, rock, clay, maybe an old tree root, maybe contamination of some sort or another.

Sometimes a contractor finds a cache of old soda bottles or maybe the foundation of some long-forgotten house. Those items might warrant a brief pause in the action, but more often than not, the pressures of the job overcome any moments of curiosity.

But if you think of all the construction, all the digging and demolition work going on around the state, it’s not a stretch to assume that every once in a while a contractor finds something that strikes a deeper chord.

And those moments mark a crossroads of sorts for the building industry, an instance where what is to come intersects with what used to be.