Marge Schott is dead .... and we care why? - Trains Magazine

The Peter Cooper Glue Factory is in Oak Creek WI, formerly known as Carrollville in the steam railroad days (what is now the City of South Milwaukee was known as Oak Creek until it incorporated in 1897). Only part of the factory is still there. I suspect what you were really looking at was the old HyNite plant. It is crumbling but intact. Just a couple of years ago the railroad for some unknown reason went in and tested the scale track that is on the plant property. There used to be a different scale house nearer the road on the spur to the sewerage treatment plant.

I would not advise tresspassing both for legal and personal safety reasons. That is a very old plant and is likely to have rotted wood floors in spots.

I remember when the Peter Cooper plant was in full operation. It would get open gondolas of animal parts, hooves, bits of flesh and skin, bones etc -- left over from Milwaukee's meat slaughter, leather tanning, and animal/pet food industries. The smell of the open gondolas on a hot day was awful -- and the flies! The railroaders called them "gut cars" and sometimes on hot days the gasses would explode or boil over the sides of the cars! But the smell of the plant in full operation was even worse. Somewhere on this forum is a series of posts on the gut cars that were parked at the old depot, now torn down. By the way the HyNite plant next door also used animal parts for fertilizers and, briefly, chicken feed. Until they learned that the heavy metals in tanned leather killed chickens.

Another sweet smell. Interestingly that whole area of Oak Creek was at one time going to be a series of liquor distilleries -- the idea was to rival Peoria Illinois in that regard.

Somewhere in the middle of the brick HyNite plant is enclosed the original wood stables for the horses that would pull the wagons that brought the product to local markets. That is why I urge you to be careful and use binoculars from public access if you want to check out this extremely interesting old plant. I imagine the oldest parts are pre 1900.

That entire area (from north to south): the sewerage treatment plant, the Peter Cooper glue works, the HyNite fertilizer plant, and the Vulcan aluminum recycling foundary, were all in full operation when I was a kid and, more importantly, were all railroad (C&NW) customers. The switcher would work the depot for a long long time arranging cars on the wye. And one leg of that wye also served an Allis Chalmers experimental factory that was very mysterious -- I guess when they wanted to build stuff out of the public eye they would do it there. And the depot also served as a team track for Oak Creek as well as a place were damaged Coal hoppers and gons were parked from the Oak Creek Power Plant -- staged before taking them to the Cudahy Car Shops.
You could build a very busy and large model train layout involving that area of Oak Creek WI. And just north of there was a different spur from the C&NW that went due west on Drexell Ave that served the Everbright Sign Co and a different sewerage treatment plant, plus a switch back to a tiny tiny factory that probably had last seen railroad service in pre truck days. It (the spur) went past the Little League Ball Park/
Dave Nelson