It serves as a monument to Charles Van Hise, a prominent Wisconsin geologist who studied the area extensively.

It is one of the best-exposed parts of the Baraboo Range, a ring of quartzite hills that passes through Columbia and Sauk Counties.

[4] The rock is named in honor of Charles Van Hise, a prominent geologist who chaired the University of Wisconsin Department of Mineralogy and Geology.

Among his significant accomplishments in geology and politics, Van Hise determined how the quartzite in the Baraboo Range had formed.

Building on earlier discoveries that the quartzite formed in the Precambrian Era and had metamorphosed, Van Hise was able to determine the forces that deformed the rock; his discoveries helped form the key principles of structural geology.