Lake Redstone, One Man's Dream
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
The water you see here did not exist before one stubborn man imagined it. Lake Redstone is entirely man-made, the creation of a local builder named Ike Isaacson. In the mid nineteen sixties, Isaacson looked at a marshy valley in Sauk County and saw a lake.
He convinced twenty-four farm families to sell him their land, a combined twenty-three hundred fifty acres. Then came the engineering feat. Crews cleared ten thousand trees, rerouted roads, and moved half a million cubic yards of earth to build a massive dike and dam across Big Creek.
Slowly the Cobleigh Valley filled, creating more than six hundred acres of water, seventeen miles of shoreline, and depths past thirty feet. The lake and the community around it now span four generations and more than eleven hundred homes.
