High-profile fight over secluded lake made artist face of resistance to DNR condemnations

Beth Martineau never gained huge fame or renown as an artist.

But the former Shorewood resident achieved a high profile in the late 1960s as a stubborn protector of private property rights, after chasing off trespassers — sometimes with shots from a rifle — and suing the state over its effort to condemn her home and studio at Upper Spring Lake.

She waged an eight-year legal battle before the state Supreme Court ruled the predecessor agency to the Department of Natural Resources lacked the power to condemn her property and add it to the Kettle Moraine State Forest.

She was so proud of her victory, it's etched on her headstone (under an artist's palette): "I fought the DNR and I won," 

Her victory was followed by two related defeats at the high court. It said she couldn't recover her attorney fees under the condemnation law since the court said the DNR's attempted taking couldn't be a condemnation.

Later, the high court said Martineau couldn't get a recordable judgment of a circuit court judge's findings regarding title to the land either, because the original condemnation proceedings from which it sprang had been thrown out.  The decisions are referred to as Martineau I, II and III.

Martineau and her then-husband bought the 58-acre property in 1941. After they divorced in 1960, she moved to a house on the lake and returned with a passion to her interest in painting, something she later told The Milwaukee Journal her husband had discouraged.

Her sons built her a studio overlooking the dam that creates the lake in 1961, which still stands today. While living and painting at the lake, Martineau fiercely protected her privacy, posting signs and erecting fences and most infamously, firing shots at assessors and fishermen who boated onto the lake.

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She first gained notoriety when, in 1964, she was tried for shooting two shots from her .22-caliber rifle into the boat of two Milwaukee fishermen on the lake. She testified that she was a crack shot and carefully put the rounds where they wouldn't harm the men. A jury convicted her and a judge sentenced her to a year's probation and fined her $75.

By her 1977 interview with The Journal, Martineau had moved on from her portrait work to concentrating on nature scenes, largely inspired by her environment at Upper Spring Lake.