The state Department of Natural Resources has asked the city of Fond du Lac to hold off on any construction on lighthouse point at Lakeside Park. A spokesman for the group Friends of Lakeside Park, John Papenheim, says the DNR is taking a second look at a proposal to build a restaurant on the peninsula after learning that area may have once been part of Lake Winnebago. “The thing in question is whether the Lighthouse Peninsula was once lakebed,” Papenheim told WFDL news. “If it was lakebed there are certain rules that go along with filled in lakebed and one of those rules, as far as I know, says nothing commercial can go on filled lakebed.” Papenheim says what apparently caught the DNR’s attention are photographs and a video made by the late historian Langdon Divers that appears to show that area of the park was once part of the lake. “It shows what is now the Big Hole (harbor) was actually the lake. He (Divers) even mentions in his video the southern shore of the lake is the southern shore of what is the Big Hole right now,” Papenheim said. “He’s got photographs of the Lighthouse Point not being there, and that was all filled in.”
