Door Peninsula Shipwrecks

Images of America: Wisconsin

by Jon Paul Van Harpen

Door County is the home to numerous shipwrecks of pleasure craft and steamers, on a photographic journey of the treacherous waters and those they have claimed. Door County is the final resting place of many shipwrecks, from the first Euro American ship to sail the western Great Lakes, LaSalle's fabled Griffin that left Washington Island in 1679 never to be heard of again, to modern-day pleasure crafts that find the shallow inlets and bays hard to navigate. Door Peninsula Shipwrecks takes the reader on a photographic journey around the peninsula and back to a time of wooden ships and iron men. From Sturgeon Bay to the east coast of the peninsula to the northern islands and Green Bay, the journey encompasses early wooden sail craft to steel steamers, the brave sailors who sailed the treacherous waters, and the heroic lifesavers who rescued them.

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2006

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Door Peninsula has enough shipwrecks, and books about them, to enlighten generations with the tales of storms, heroic rescues and survival on the Great Lakes. Van Harpen does an excellent job of telling the stories that readers have not read about in other books and includes wonderful photos of the crew, the ships in port and those wrecked along the shore. His research helps the reader understand how important these ships were to the growth of industry along the Great Lakes. He explains the types of ships that hauled stone and lumber from the north and grain from the west; coal and supplies from the east through all types of weather, from as soon as the ice left the lakes until it froze again and leaves us wondering what the life of a seaman was in the days of old. Unfortunately though, the disasters are chronicled in the shear numbers of wrecks below the waters - frozen in time. The wonderful photos in the book are from various collections and the stories that accompany them are intriguing, to say the least. Van Harpen writes that fewer than half the list of ships known to have gone down in Death's Door have been found. Makes one wonder if there just might be a Door Peninsula Shipwrecks II in the near future?