[2] The formation is located northeast of the junction of Wood Avenue and General Mitchell Boulevard, on the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center grounds.

[4] Soldiers' Home Reef was formed during the Silurian period of the Paleozoic Era, about 400 million years ago, when Wisconsin lay under a shallow tropical sea.

Beneath that sea, ancient corals constructed the reef where trilobites, cephalopods, brachiopods, pelmatozoans, bivalves, and bryozoans lived and were eventually preserved as limestone.

In more recent geologic time, the hard limestone mound was overrun by one or more glaciers, but resisted the grinding action, forming a roche moutonnée, which was then covered by glacial deposits, then exposed again by the Menomonee River's erosion.

[4] Further understanding came when Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin noted that each fossilized reef in the area contained a somewhat different community of creatures, in his 1877 Geology of Eastern Wisconsin.