Long before it was home to a 6,800-student university, long before 1965, before it was the site for small farms, the 18-hole Shorewood Country Club and scattered bayshore cottages and businesses, and well before it was home to Belgian settlers, timber crews or indigenous people, the UWGB campus was… an Ice Age buried forest. At the time of excavation for the Weidner Center construction in 1991, construction crews found samples of conifer logs buried deep beneath the clay. Sedimentologists including UW-Green Bay’s Ron Stieglitz quickly identified the wood as remmants of a larger forest known as the Two Creeks Buried Forest near Lake Michigan. Unearthed wood, radiocarbon-dated at 11,850 before present, provided an absolute date on late-glacial sequences and evidence that periods between glacial advances were long enough for forests to develop. The forest of black and white spruce, hemlock and pine was flattened by the glaciers’ most recent advance, and buried under silt and clay.
