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- As seen from space, Wisconsin's thumb of land,
Door County,
juts out between Lake Michigan and Green Bay,
part of a rock formation called the Niagara Escarpment.
- The Niagara Escarpment is
about a 1,000-mile long ridge of rock that runs
through Door County,
all the way up into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
into Ontario, Canada, and ends around Niagara Falls.
It's actually the rock that Niagara Falls flows over.
And if you look at the rocks here,
you'll see there are these really beautiful,
tall cliffs on the western side of the peninsula.
The cliff is called an escarpment
because it's a steep vertical cliff.
- Glaciers formed the peninsula of Door County
during the last ice age.
- When the ice hit that ridge of rock,
it actually split it into two different lobes
that then actually carved out Lake Michigan and Green Bay
because of the Niagara Escarpment.
- As the glaciers retreated,
Paleo-Indians arrived in the area
now known as Sturgeon Bay, and set up camp sites.
Here, archeologists found spear points and stone tools,
used over 10,000 years ago to hunt and process large game.
Archaeologists also found evidence throughout the county
of many groups and tribes,
drawn for thousands of years,
to the rich hunting and fishing grounds of Door County.
Many of the early European settlers
came to the remote islands north of the peninsula,
taking advantage of waters teeming with fish.
- By 1860, there was close to 200 people on Rock Island,
200 on St. Martin's.
And, of course, the boats were double-enders,
wooden boats, Mackinaw boats.
They were light boats,
a lot of them were made of cedar,
so with a man on each side,
you could pull them right up on any beach, any gravel beach.
And you didn't need a dock, and that was important,
because you wanted to be close to your fishery.
After all, you either rowed or you sailed, not easy.
And especially if there wasn't much wind,
then you rowed, period.
Of course, with the Mackinaw boats,
everything was done by hand, you pulled the nets by hand.
Deadly work, you know.
But that's the history of the fishery.
There was an awful lot of hard work in it.
- Asa Thorp, after a season of making barrels
for the fishermen on Rock Island,
boarded a steamer bound for Green Bay.
- And the captain was sort of telling him his woes
about how difficult it is to run this side of the bay.
There were no villages, there were no docks.
So they would have to anchor, send the men into the shore
and collect driftwood to burn for the steamers.
And the captain said, "If a guy were smart,
this is where he'd put a dock."
- Thorp took the advice, and built a dock,
and eventually a sawmill, at Fish Creek,
to take part in the harvest of the heavy forest
that covered Door County.
- Very, very deep forest; very mature forest.
North, was largely pine; very good pine.
And then they had hemlocks along on the sandy shores.
And in the swamps,
they had the cedar.
And then, they also had maple and birch and tamarack.
A person would buy maybe 2,000 acres
and they would get a sawmill into the area.
And the peninsula of Door County
doesn't have any navigable streams,
so all the logs had to be transported to the shore.
And around the area of Door County,
at one time, there were 60 docks
and there were about 66 sawmills.
- Using the variety of local woods,
local shipbuilders built schooners
to carry the lumber to market.
Many of the boats traveled around the tip of the peninsula,
through Death's Door,
the treacherous passage that gave the county its name.
- When you were going to Chicago,
if you could go through Death's Door,
instead of coming up to the Rock Island passage,
you might save a day of sailing.
And, of course, a lot of these skippers
had great confidence in their own ability.
And it didn't always work out so well,
because that's a very treacherous water.
When you get strong winds,
quite often
the current is into the wind very strong,
and you can't see it.
When you get into the middle of that
and you've got all your sail up
and you're not going ahead, you're in big trouble.
Big ships, 150-footers...
The Resumptionwent aground on Plum Island.
Beautiful big ships, you know.
There were three of them went aground on Pilot Island
within a couple weeks in one fall.
So there are dozens of shipwrecks
on that Death's Door passage.
- As the loggers moved on,
families began to settle onto the land, and build farms.
- And it was a tough go.
The hardships are beyond our imagination, really.
There were places they could get enough topsoil to plant crops,
and they did-- there was quite a bit of farming up here.
But it was a tough kind of farming.
- First, they had to clear the land,
and then pull the stumps,
and a huge, labor-intensive-- Terrible, you know.
And then when they put the plow in the ground,
all they got was rocks.
(laughing)
- So if you drive through the county, in almost any village,
you will see beautiful, constructed stone fences,
and thrown-together stone fences.
- Those are symbols
of hard-gained cropland.
- As farms developed,
villages grew up around the loading docks.
The settlers built schools, and churches,
and endured long, and often brutal, winters.
- A lot of disease.
A lot of them died of
whooping cough, tuberculosis, plague.
But we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude,
and we cannot appreciate what they went through
to settle this area.
(fiddle music)
- This is our great grandpa and grandma.
Francois.
That's "Francis" of course, but... Francois Evrard.
And her name was Florentine Patris.
- In 1853,
the first of thousands of Belgian immigrants
began to settle
in southern Door, Brown, and Kewaunee counties.
- And they created
an ethnic island,
here in northeast Wisconsin.
- They were persuaded to settle in the area
by Father Edward Daems,
a Catholic priest who spoke the Belgian language
of Walloon.
- The reason that they all came here was the language.
It was a cultural element
that made it so appealing.
(speaking in Walloon)
- Grandma only talked Walloon, so I still talked with her,
and I'm glad I did.
And my mother and I talked Walloon.
The day she died,
we still had a conversation in Walloon.
- The land had not been settled for good reason.
It was heavily forested,
and it was just a very difficult place to make a living.
But they persevered.
(speaking in Walloon)
- As the Belgians cleared their land,
they also produced wooden shingles
to bring in much-needed cash,
and built a dock to transport goods.
- Years ago, there was a boat
by the name of theDennessen.
And they'd take their shingles
and a cow, or anything they had, to haul it.
They'd take it down to Green Bay.
They'd put it on the boat,
and then the people,
some people want to come visit their relatives up here.
They'd take the boat and they'd go down over there,
and then, vice versa.
(fire roaring)
- In 1871,
on the same night as the Chicago Fire,
the Great Peshtigo Fire swept up both sides of Green Bay.
A dry forest and high winds
whipped small fires into an inferno,
that spread through the Belgian community.
(horse whinnying frantically)
- Wind came up and ignited all of these small fires
to become one big fire,
and it just kept growing and growing,
and it was like a tornado of fire.
(fire roaring)
- My great grandfather and great grandmother
grabbed woolen blankets,
and they were going down into the well.
And the fire went over them and on the side of them.
And they came out of the well,
and said they looked around,
and all they could see was burned land.
There was nothing--
There was nothing left of what they had worked so hard to do.
- With many killed, and hundreds homeless,
the Belgians slowly began to rebuild their farms
on the rocky, burned over land,
and made the most of the resources that were left.
- Now any forest fire:
it will destroy the foliage, it will char the bark,
but it won't consume the tree.
And so the Belgians spent winters rescuing timber.
And then, a building boom took place here.
Those are log houses.
They covered them with locally-made brick.
Now, we don't have to go to Quebec,
or we don't have to go to Europe
to see classic examples of folk architecture.
It's right here in northeast Wisconsin.
♪ ♪
- There are small little chapels
dotted along the Belgian countryside here.
It is a practice that was brought from the old country.
- The chapels, in their interior,
have some characteristics.
A alter at the end of the very small room,
and then a number of artifacts on the alter.
Tremendous symmetry.
They were an important part
of the religious fabric of the area.
The Belgians are very religious.
A lot of the life then and a lot of life today
revolves around the local parishes.
- I lived right next door,
so I'd have to come to church...
...a lot.
They'd send me: "Oh, you'd better go to church today."
"It's a good day for you to go to church, or..."
- We were all Catholic.
The Lutheran-- You didn't-- You didn't marry a Luth--
outside your religion.
I know when I was in high school,
my mother didn't even want me to have a friend
that was not Catholic.
As Wisconsinites, we know
that we have a plethora
of ethnic islands here.
But most of them have eroded, and lost their identity.
The Belgians have not.
- I guess the thing of the people staying together,
working together, because they always worked.
The thrashing crew was made up of all your neighbors,
everybody came to help.
No matter what,
you always had people to help, they helped one other.
- We had a bunch of men come over with big poles,
and they put up the barn.
And that night,
the rafters are up, and a big storm came,
and blew it down.
And all the neighbors came over the following day.
They all pitched in, took all the boards apart,
took the nails out of the boards,
and two days after, the barn was back up.
All the neighbors came and helped.
- They worked hard, they played hard.
Good times, dances,
and maybe when there were weddings or funerals--
Funerals were big things, really big things.
Everyone just seemed to be happy around here.
You could visit with people, and...
- The ethnic island that they defined
within the area of northeast Wisconsin
still exists.
They have retained their ties with each other
on this land for that many years.
And that's just remarkable.
♪ ♪
- In 1872, work began on clearing the land
for a canal
that would connect Sturgeon Bay with Lake Michigan.
The canal would create a big shortcut,
reducing the need to travel around the peninsula,
and through the Death's Door passage.
With the canal, Sturgeon Bay suddenly became
a busy Lake Michigan and Green Bay port.
Schooners would tie together, and split the towing fee,
in what became known as "a big tow."
The shipbuilding and ship repair industries expanded,
and shoreline rock quarries
now had a direct route to Lake Michigan markets.
With easier access, a new industry, tourism,
began to take hold in Sturgeon Bay
and the Green Bay side of the peninsula.
With almost 300 miles of shoreline,
much of it considered worthless for farming,
it was only a matter of time,
before tourists began to discover
the cool breezes and beauty of Door County.
In Fish Creek, dockmaster Asa Thorp,
sold fuel to steamboats,
and also ran a small boardinghouse.
- The lumbermen, the salesmen, anyone that came to the village,
he would put up.
And soon, the people wanted to get off of the ship
when they came into the village.
So as they were taking on new wood,
they would walk up and down the streets,
and people loved how cool it was,
and how lovely this little village, and the air was clean,
and it felt so good...
And soon they started asking Asa
if they couldn't stay in the boarding house.
I think he must have been a very ingenious guy,
and that's the next thing he did.
He built a very fine hotel.
It just seem that that was the way the village was going to go,
and so that the fishing and lumbering village
of the late 1800s quickly became--
By 1905, 1910, people were building hotels.
They were already up.
- Just to the north, in Ephraim,
village residents were amazed when a ship's passenger
inquired about staying in the village overnight.
- And asked the dockmaster if there was someplace to stay.
He was told, "No, there were no hotels."