Lodi School Hillside

In 1926, local residents began to build terraced walls and stone staircases into this hillside overlooking downtown Lodi, but money soon ran out. In 1935 work resumed utilizing funding from the Civil Works Administration, a New Deal program that created work all across the country during the Great Depression. The staircases and terraces were designed by Franz Aust, the first professor of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin. Local workers provided the labor for these features, laying down the sandstone and limestone that still flank School Hill. The School Hillside Terrace was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.