Heritage Hill State Historical Park
Historic buildings, interpreters, trades, and gardens connect Indigenous homelands, Fort Howard, fur trade, settlement, and city life across a 56-acre campus.
Artwork inspired by Ruth Grotenrath
Heritage Hill organizes relocated and reconstructed buildings into broad eras, from fur trade and Fort Howard through growing settlement and a crossroads community. That physical timeline makes construction, military power, commerce, household work, schooling, faith, and civic life comparable, but it must be read as an interpretation assembled on this site.
The deeper story begins before the buildings. The lower Fox River and Green Bay are within enduring Menominee and Ho-Chunk histories and near the Oneida Nation’s present homeland. Use interpreter programs and material demonstrations to ask how sovereignty, treaties, migration, military authority, and resource economies intersect—not to watch generic “pioneer life.”
- Campus
- 56 acres
- Buildings
- 26 historic and reproduction structures
- Span
- 1672–1940
Quick guide
- Begin with the land
- Identify Native nations and waterways before entering the fur-trade or military zones
- Necessary context
- Native sovereignty and waterways
Cross four eras without accepting a simple progress story
- Begin with the land
- Identify Native nations and waterways before entering the fur-trade or military zones.
- Compare construction
- Logs, frames, masonry, nails, windows, and heating reveal changing resources and labor.
- Watch a trade closely
- Ask what skill, fuel, raw material, market, and risk sit behind a demonstration.
- Remember relocation
- Many buildings were moved or reconstructed; their arrangement is a teaching tool, not an original village plan.
Good to know
The park’s buildings were assembled from different places and periods; use the era map so proximity is not mistaken for original context.
Notice these
- Fort Howard buildings
- Fur-trade cabin
- Crossroads village