Have you ever toured the Cherryland Brewery?

Motorists purchase tickets for auto ferry at tiny
Northport, Wis., located at the very tip of Door
County, Wis.

Have you shopped at the Cherry Pointe Mall or had a meal at Perry's Cherry Diner?

Have you ever stayed at Cherry Hills Lodge?

Have you ever entered any of the Cherry Olympic events, such as Cherry Bowling?

If you haven’t done any of the these, perhaps you’ve never visited Door County, Wis.

In Door County, you can catch the boat from the “Northport Pier” to Washington Island, or perhaps you would like to take a “lighthouse walk.” On May 17 and 18, there will be “self-guided” tours of “five mainland lighthouses,” sponsored by the Door County Maritime Museum and Lighthouse Preservation Society. Boat tours to island lighthouse sites will also be available.

If Leelanau County has a twin anywhere, it is Door County, located directly across Lake Michigan and providing Green Bay with its eastern shoreline.

Door County, covered with cherry and apple orchards and dotted with small villages, has a history, in a number of respects, remarkably like Leelanau’s.

Its local climate, so much like Leelanau’s, is due to its own peninsular status. It, too, is set off from Lake Michigan proper by a large bay – the big lake’s largest, in fact.
Although Green Bay is much larger than Grand Traverse Bay, it is not as deep, and partly for that reason, has historically been the largest body of freshwater in the country to “consistently freeze over each winter.”

Door County, perhaps because of its relative proximity to metropolitan centers such as Chicago and Milwaukee, seems to have capitalized earlier on a “Cherryland” designation we normally associate with this corner of Michigan.

Writing for National Geographic in April 1934, Maynard Owen Williams reported the county “claims to have the world’s most concentrated cherry-orchard area.”

In an article entitled “Around Our Inland Seas,” he gives some details about cherry growing on the Door Peninsula.

“What between cherries and summer resorts, Door County is a busy place,” he wrote, and he describes “cherry orchards decorated with signs reading ‘Pick your own, one cent a pound.’”

“Enough lusciousness for three or four deep, gory cherry pies for fifteen cents.”

Williams visited Leelanau County, too, but had almost nothing to say about it and made no mention of this county’s cherries.

He did visit Glen Lake, however, and wrote, “Never have I seen a lake more beautiful.”
Door County’s topography is hilly, but instead of sand dunes on the shoreline, one sometimes finds prominent rocky bluffs instead. That’s because the county rests atop the Niagara escarpment that, like a giant horseshoe, also helps to form, in Lake Huron, the Bruce Peninsula, behind which lies the largest of all the bays on the Great Lakes – Georgian Bay.

By following the 45th Parallel from Leland across Lake Michigan to Door County, one would wind up at Baileys Harbor, one of several picturesque county villages located on the lakeshore.

Others include Jacksonport, Gills Rock, Ellison Bay and Sister Bay, Fish Creek and Egg Harbor. Door County is famous for “fish boils,” in big outdoor iron pots, in places like Fish Creek.

Just as Leelanau became home to various nationalities from the “Old World,” so did Door County in the 19th century. Settlers came from Germany, Moravia and various Scandinavian countries, such as Sweden and Iceland.

The latter often took up commercial fishing, as did their Norwegian counterparts on this side of the big lake.

The “gill net” fishing tug, so inextricably associated with Leland, could readily be found in at least half-a-dozen of the lakeside villages.

But recreational boating, too, has deep roots there.

While Leelanau could claim the Northport Pointe Yacht Club and the Omena-Traverse Yacht Club, Door had the Ephraim Yacht Club on the “Green Bay Side” and a yacht club directly on Lake Michigan as well, at Bailey’s Harbor.

Interestingly enough, one could probably sail from Bailey’s Harbor to Leland almost as quickly as from Bailey’s Harbor to Ephraim, in the same county, via the “Port des Morts.”

Indeed, Door County derives its name from “Port des Morts,” or “Death’s Door,” the treacherous passage around the tip of the peninsula. And, like Leelanau, Door County collected more than its share of shipwrecks in the days of “wooden ships and iron men.”

One of them was the small steamer Erie L. Hackley, which once ran between the Manitou islands and the mainland. It foundered in a storm on Green Bay in October 1903. Another ship claimed by Green Bay was the Alvin Clark, which capsized in a sudden summer gale in 1863. The hatches had not been secured, and when the wind pushed the ship over on its beam ends, it quickly filled and sank in over 100 feet of water.

In its edition of July 8, the Milwaukee Journal reported “the schooner (it was actually a brigantine) Alvin Clark was capsized in a gale about 5 o’clock P.M. Wednesday, 29th, off Chambers Island, and her captain, mate and one of her crew were drowned. The balance of the crew were picked up by a brig, name unknown.”

The ship had been traveling light (empty) for a load of lumber at Oconto, Wis.

Over a century later, in November 1967, a fishing trawler snagged its net on the masts of the Clark and could not recover it. Marking the location with a buoy, skin divers were contacted to salvage the $1,400 net. What they found, an intact, undamaged ship, built in 1846, was worth much more than a fishing net.

Most lost ships, including those to be found in the Manitou Passage, are indeed “wrecks,” but the Clark, because of the nature of her loss, constituted something entirely different.

First, artifacts were recovered and then, the entire ship was raised and taken to the Menominee River, where it served for a time as a tourist attraction. Unfortunately, it couldn’t “pay its way” and was eventually demolished where it lay.

For a while, however, it was the “ultimate time capsule” for this end of Lake Michigan.