At the Potosi Brewery, Wisconsin, there is a parking lot directly south of the old brewery building. The back of the parking lot has a, roughly, eleven foot high by seventy foot long limestone block wall. This wall is a retaining wall for the steep bluff sloping up behind it. The wall also contains a door, a recess and an opening. The wall was definitely meant as a part of something larger than what is shows itself today.
Potosi was first settled by lead miners that lived, at first, in dirt mounds. They used the slope of the hill and dugout into them. This is seen at the nationally historic registered Badger Huts a mile north of the brewery. The miners, as well as, the auxiliary businesses needed living quarters. Possibly people lived behind the door of the wall until their home was built.
The wall was part of a larger building known locally as the Rock House. The wall was the back foundation and first floor support for the two and a half story stone building with an attached one story stone shed.
The land on which the rock house was built upon was first documented to be owned by Samuel E. Lewis, an Austrian immigrant. Then, around 1840, the two lots on which the house sat was owned and lived in by Joseph and Mary Jarratt, and his family. Both of them English immigrants. Joseph was a butcher and later became a farmer. The Jarrat’s owned the house and lots until about 1855.
Gabriel Hail and Joseph Albrecht, both German immigrants, built the two story Hail Albrecht brewery in 1855. The Jarrat’s must have rented the house to the Hails until Gabriel Hail bought the house and other pieces of land. An 1868 map shows Gabriel “Hale” lived in the house his wife Elizabeth and their family.
The Rock House did have some alterations through the years but it no longer survives except for its back structural wall in the Potosi brewery parking lot.