Door County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Door County

Three hundred miles of shoreline inside a single county outside Alaska — Door County's Green Bay coast on the west and Lake Michigan coast on the east, plus the Washington Island archipelago at the peninsula's tip, total more linear waterfront than any county in the contiguous United States per the Wisconsin Sea Grant coastal mileage inventory, and the 70-mile-long peninsula geography squeezes that shoreline into a strip never more than 12 miles wide. The strait between the tip of the peninsula at Northport Pier and Washington Island (Porte des Morts, French for 'Death's Door,' anglicized as Death's Door Passage) earned its name from the 19th-century commercial-shipping shipwreck count — the strait's combination of shoaling sand bars, abrupt depth changes, and unpredictable wind shifts off Lake Michigan produced dozens of wrecks during the schooner era, with the Door County Maritime Museum's database listing 275+ documented vessel losses in the strait between 1830 and 1930. Door County's 482 sq mi hold eleven Wisconsin state parks (the highest concentration of state parks in any county in the state per Wisconsin DNR Parks System inventory), the Door County Coastal Byway (WI-42 north from Sturgeon Bay to Northport, designated a Wisconsin Scenic Byway), and the agricultural cherry-and-apple orchard belt that supplied the Northeastern industrial cities with seasonal fruit through the 19th-and-early-20th-century rail era.

The annual Cherry Festival every July routes 50,000+ visitors through Egg Harbor and Sturgeon Bay during the peak Montmorency tart-cherry harvest. Peninsula State Park (the second-most-visited state park in Wisconsin behind Devil's Lake, with 1.1 million annual visitors per WDNR State Parks 2023 visitation reports) accepts rigs to 50 ft with electric hookups across 469 sites split among the Tennison Bay, Welcker's Point, and Nicolet Bay campgrounds. Newport, Whitefish Dunes, and Potawatomi state parks accept rigs to 40 ft. Washington Island is accessible by the Washington Island Ferry's year-round car-ferry service (the only ice-strengthened passenger ferry on the Great Lakes, operating through the winter ice season on a reduced schedule); the ferry accepts RVs up to 40 ft with advance reservation. Sturgeon Bay (population 9,646, the county seat) anchors the year-round resupply economy. Cave Point County Park's limestone sea-caves are the canonical Door County kayak destination.