Door County Facts

Door County is a county in the U.S. state of Wisconsin.  Its county seat is Sturgeon Bay.

The county was created in 1851 and organized in 1861. It is named after the strait between the Door Peninsula and Washington Island. The dangerous passage, known as Death’s Door, is scattered with shipwrecks and was known to early French explorers and local Native Americans.

• Land Area: 482.72 sq miles
• Water Area: 1,887.11 sq miles
• Elevation: 588 ft at Sturgeon Bay
• Number of Lakes: 25
• Area in Lakes: 3,254 acres (5.08 sq miles)
• Rivers: Ahnapee, Mink
• Major Watershed: Lake Michigan

History

Paleo-Indian artifacts were found at the Cardy Site – located on the Door Peninsula south of Sturgeon Bay, including Clovis points.  As of 2007, seven Clovis points have been found in the county. Artifacts from an ancient village site at Nicolet Bay Beach date to about 400 BC. This site was occupied by various cultures until about 1300 AD.

Door County’s name came from Porte des Morts (“Death’s Door”), the passage between the tip of Door Peninsula and Washington Island.  It is a common misconception that the name “Death’s Door” arose from the number of shipwrecks associated with the passage. It was instead the result of Native American tales, heard by early French explorers and published in greatly embellished form by Hjalmar Holand, about a failed raid by the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tribe to capture Washington Island from the rival Pottawatomie tribe in the early 1600s.

In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt recommended that the Shivering Sands area be protected. Today this area includes Whitefish Dunes, Kellner’s Fen, Shivering Sands wetland complex, and Cave Point County Park. Hjalmar Holand, an Ephraim resident, promoted Door County as a tourist destination in the first half of the 20th century. As part of a committee begun in 1927 to protect and promote historical sites, he recommended the establishment of a series of county parks.

Since then the tourism industry has grown. Although Door County has a year-round population of about 28,000, it experiences an influx of tourists each summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with over 2.1 million visitors per year. The majority of tourists and summer residents come from the metropolitan areas of Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison, Green Bay, and the Twin Cities, although Illinois residents are the dominant group both in Door County and further south along the eastern edge of Wisconsin.

Kangaroo Lake & the local area

1156 acres in size with a maximum depth of 12 feet.

Kangaroo Lake is the largest inland lake in Door County, Wisconsin.  Located in the towns of Baileys Harbor and Jacksonport, and is the main feature of Kangaroo Lake State Natural Area.

The lake, located a half mile from Lake Michigan, is fed by Piel Creek and surrounded by a lowland marsh. The bottom of the lake is lined with marl. Many types of fish can be found in the lake.

Kangaroo Lake’s story is a reminder that Door County’s map has never been “finished,” it just pauses for a while between edits. Thousands of years ago, Kangaroo Lake was actually an embayment of Lake Michigan, open water connected to the big lake before shifting shorelines and sand movement reshaped it into the inland lake we know today. Along Heins Creek, early archaeological work documented evidence of a large Indigenous village site dating back about 1,300 years, pointing to long-term seasonal life and travel through this corridor between inland waters and Lake Michigan.

In the late 1800s, another major change arrived courtesy of human hands: the causeway built in the late 1800s that split Kangaroo Lake into two distinct personalities, a more developed southern portion and a wetter, quieter north. That northern end retained extensive marsh and wetland habitat and later earned formal protection, becoming part of a Wisconsin State Natural Area designation (2002) with ownership tied to conservation groups. This mix of geology, hydrology, and preservation is why Kangaroo Lake feels like both a neighborhood lake and a living nature museum at the same time.

Out on Lake Michigan, the water off Baileys Harbor has been giving up fresh chapters of “recent history” in a very literal way: shipwreck discovery. In 2025, researchers and citizen scientists located the long-sought wreck of the F.J. King, a 144-foot, three-masted schooner that sank in 1886 and became known as a kind of Great Lakes “ghost ship” because searchers couldn’t pin down its true resting place for decades. The find is especially striking because Lake Michigan’s cold freshwater can preserve wrecks remarkably well, turning them into underwater time capsules and also sparking urgency as invasive mussels accelerate deterioration on some sites.

That same theme continued nearby with the Frank D. Barker, another Door County-area wreck rediscovered in 2025 after being lost for 138 years, this one spotted when a local boater noticed something unusual in the water near the northern Door coastline and reported it for follow-up investigation. Together, these finds underline what makes the Baileys Harbor to North Bay stretch special: it isn’t just scenic shoreline, it’s a historically busy corridor where storms, fog, reefs, and commerce all collided, leaving artifacts that modern sonar and sharp eyes are still uncovering.

Closer to Jacksonport and North Bay, the maritime history becomes more “within snorkel range.” Jacksonport’s nearshore wrecks (including sites tied to the old pier area) are part of a documented maritime trail story that connects settlement-era commerce with what remains visible today in shallow water. North Bay also has recognized wreck sites in relatively shallow depths, reinforcing how this coastline keeps history close to the surface, sometimes literally just offshore over sand and stone.