With campsites, hiking trails, a canoe landing, picnic areas, and a fully staffed park office, Tower Hill offers visitors a complete natural recreation experience together with a fascinating glimpse of Wisconsin history.

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For three decades in the mid 1800s, this site was the location of a major lead shot production operation that supplied ammunition to the nation's military as well as to hunters and trappers. The shot operation was the economic centerpiece of a much larger project: the community of Helena, of which nothing but the cemetery survives. With the spanning of the river by the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad in 1856-57, Helena, its river trading business, and the shot industry were doomed - virtually on the eve of the Civil War. Eventually, the site passed into the hands of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a well-known Unitarian minister from Chicago and uncle to Frank Lloyd Wright, who used the property as a retreat and rest haven for his fellow ministers. In 1922 his widow, Edith Lloyd Jones, donated the land and tower to the state for use as a park.

Visitors to the park can take a lovely walk to the top of the bluff where the old shot tower and smelter house have been reconstructed, and where an exhibit explains how the operation worked. The shot making process was quite simple: lead was melted at the top of the tower, then poured with a ladle through a sieve or colander with a variety of hole sizes. The lead drops became almost perfectly spherical as they fell the entire length of the shaft - a total of 180 feet, counting the wooden as well as the underground mine shaft - to a cooling pool below. Paths can be followed back down to the site of this collection pool, which is reached via a very dark walk through a 90-foot horizontal shaft dug directly in the base of the rock bluff.

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