An Afternoon at Asylum Point

Yesterday, the sixth, my dad (Tim) and I drove down to Oshkosh for the afternoon and ended up at Asylum Point. It’s a quiet little Winnebago County park on the north edge of town, out on Sherman Road, where Lake Winnebago pushes into a shallow bay. It was clear and calm, the kind of afternoon where the water goes flat and you can hear the bugs going in the tall grass.

I’d always thought of the place as “that park with the lighthouse,” and there it was, sitting out on its own little island a few feet off the shore. It’s a stubby stone tower, only about thirty feet tall, and it has never once done a lighthouse’s actual job. The Works Progress Administration built it in 1937, but it was never approved as a navigational light, so it was never lit. It has just stood there for the better part of a century, looking the part and nothing more.

The name threw me too. It comes from the old Northern Hospital for the Insane, which opened nearby in 1871 and is now the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The bay, the point, and the little lighthouse all kept the old name.

You get out to the island on a short bridge, and the one there now is only a few years old. The old bridge had fallen apart and then took storm damage in 2019, so the county built a new one to get people back out to the tower. We took our time crossing it and poked around the island, which is really just a scrap of trees and wildflowers with a couple of worn paths. No benches, no picnic tables. Just the tower and the water.

And what a calm view it was. The lake was glass, a few reeds standing up out of the shallows, the far shore a low green line across the bay. There’s a boat launch here and it’s supposed to be good fishing, and people come for the birds, but we were happy just to stand and look.

The best part came on the way back. My dad spotted a whole tangle of wild black raspberries along the edge, ripe and ready, the black ones right next to the red ones that hadn’t turned yet. He got right into the bushes and started picking. They’re small, nothing like the fat berries at the store, but they taste like summer in a way the store ones never quite manage.

That was the whole outing. A stone lighthouse that never got to be a lighthouse, a calm lake, a bridge to a little island, and a handful of wild raspberries my dad picked off the bushes. Some afternoons don’t need to be more than that.

Asylum Point is one of the spots in my photo guessing game, Where in the Fox Cities? See if you can find it on the map.