Warnimont Park Sits on Former Garbage Dump

Warnimont Golf Course sign. Photo taken Jan. 8, 2025 by Graham Kilmer.

You probably didn’t know it, but there’s a former landfill in Warnimont Park.

In 1958, the Milwaukee County Parks Commission created Warnimont Park, perched along bluffs along the shore of Lake Michigan in Cudahy. Over the years, the parks system has built an 18-hole golf course and a winding section of the Oak Leaf Trail running through the park. Visitors come to the 248-acre park to practice archery or walk their dog.

But before any of that happened, it was the site of a landfill known by the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) as the Manke Dump.

The Manke Dump became a place for refuse as early as 1935. It was not licensed and dumping continued there into the 1970s, even after the Parks Commission purchased the property. The dump is allegedly loaded with industrial waste like foundry sands, core sands and castings, as well as car bodies, empty barrels, pieces of trees, municipal garage and debris from construction of the golf course.

The landfill is located in a ravine near the shoreline. It is on land within the park located east of the intersection of E. Ramsey Avenue and S. Lake Drive. The landfill has been covered in a soil cap and today, plants grow over the 20th century trash and cyclists on the Oak Leaf Trail ride over it.

The site has been environmentally investigated many times over the years. Milwaukee County Parks is working to officially close the book on the landfill by meeting all the DNR’s requirements for documentation and remediation. The department still has some work to do, yet, according to public bidding documents for potential contractors.

“The extent of waste is not clearly defined, contaminant migration pathways have not all been assessed, and contamination may still be discharging from the landfill to the environment,” according to a 2024 letter from Pamela A. Mylotta, DNR Remediation & Redevelopment Program supervisor for Southeastern Wisconsin.

Parks is planning to develop a plan to reassess the landfill, the thickness of its soil cap, whether contaminants are seeping out and where. The dump is also located near the lake, and there is concern that waste or contaminated material could someday slough off into the lake or onto the beach below. The DNR is asking parks to provided a detailed plan for keeping an eye on these issues, and how they will be addressed if they are discovered.

Milwaukee County Parks is in charge more than 15,000 acres in Milwaukee County. The department has been involved in projects remediating the damage of Milwaukee’s industrial past, including projects under a regional effort to restore habitats and clean up pollution in the Milwaukee River Estuary.

The Manke Dump is also not the first landfill the county has had to contend with. The county found itself responsible for a former Allis-Chalmers landfill in 2015 through property tax foreclosure. The now-defunct company used the property, a former gravel mine in Greenfield, to dump foundry sand in the second half of the twentieth century.

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