(OMRO) NBC 26 — You don't find many tall buildings on farms across Wisconsin.
However, there is one notable exception in Omro where an old tower stands on a farm as a remnant of an important part of the state's history and a labor of love for the family that bought it back, more than a century later.
And it raises some questions:
What's it doing here? Why did a farm ever need a structure this tall? And why are the owners working so hard to repair it?
The answers lie in the fabric of one family's story and the history of Wisconsin.
This structure is more than a tower. It's a touchstone to the past.
For the King family, it's a way to trace their roots all the way back to when this land was known as the Wisconsin Territory.
"They were opening Wisconsin for settlement so we could become a state, and so they were encouraging people to move here," said Randy King, one of the tower's co-owners.
"William, the King family, the guy that came here in 1847, [after] retirement from the military, they said, 'Where do you want to settle or homestead?' and he said, 'This area right here,' and so they just deeded him this area.
In 1871, William's grandson Charles built an Italianate-style brick farmhouse, which became the King family homestead.
The family lived in the home for decades, but that changed in 1924.
"When one generation died off and they divided up some of the properties, the King that inherited that house didn't want to live there and sold it. The King family still lived here, but that parcel was no longer the King's," said Randy.
The homestead was sold to a man named Florent Shepard Cole, who used the property to capitalize on a then-booming part of Wisconsin's economy, fox-trapping.
"Silver foxes are kind of a real special, special anomaly. Nobody else had that. He was the supplier of silver fox," said Randy.
To keep watch over his prized foxes, Cole built something unusual for a Wisconsin farm... a tower.
First, a wooden structure in 1925, and then, a decade later, a sturdier version of steel and brick.
He called it the Cole Watch Tower.
"Who would build a seven-story high tower? But he did it because he could. He had the money, and it's a little ostentatious for a fur farm, but it's still kind of a cool story," said Randy.
"It was really only operational as a fox tower, this brick building, for a few years," said Randy's son, Seth King.
After the fur trade collapsed, the property was repurposed into a butcher shop and meat locker in the 1950s, and later became a dairy processing plant and ice cream shop.
Ownership continued to change hands over the years, but it was always special to the Kings.
"We, I want to say, looked longingly at it and kind of gave up that we're never going to get it," said Randy, who used to get ice cream with his siblings at the ice cream shop after school.
But more than a century later, after 101 years, the Kings officially bought it back in April.
"I was just like a little kid with a piece of candy. I mean it's like can you believe it?," recalls Randy.
But now the real work begins.
"Some things that had been overlooked and neglected over the years just because of the sheer size of the project," said Seth, who is the project manager for what is now known as the Omro Fox Tower.
"It was way worse than what we envisioned. It took a little bit of a reality check like hey this isn't funny. I mean we got to start by renting dumpsters," said Randy.
When asked why even bother repairing the tower, Seth replied, "Partially for our family, partially for the community, there's a story to be told where we came from, how we got here."
"It's part of northeast Wisconsin history. This is what was out here. Legacy farms. These are all people that came here in the 1800s, and they're still here," said Randy
If you want to learn about the Omro Fox Tower and how to support its repairs, you can visit the property's website or donate to the project's GoFundMe.
Drone footage was provided by Graf-X Industries LLC, and you can find their website HERE.
The image of the property as a dairy process was provided by VintageAerial.com.
