Death’s Door

The passage was so treacherous that a canal was cut through Sturgeon Bay in 1881 to avoid it entirely, shaving 150 miles off the trip between Green Bay and ports like Milwaukee and Chicago. The problem? Currents that sometimes run against the wind, rendering sailing vessels helpless as they drifted toward rock-bound shores. Between 1837 and 1914, Death’s Door claimed 24 sailing vessels, with dozens more wrecked nearby. Today, some 240 known shipwrecks rest in Door County’s waters, which one marine archaeologist calls ‘museums on the bottom of the lake.’

The name is older than the wrecks. A French document from 1728 records the strait as Cap à la Mort, and charts still label it Porte des Morts. The event behind it, usually told as a Native American war party lost to a sudden storm, has never been confirmed. The hazards were better documented: the official 1906 Sailing Directions for Lake Michigan warned of a wind-driven current often too strong for sailing vessels to make headway, along a coast where any ship driven ashore was likely lost. Lights went up on Plum Island in 1848 and Pilot Island in 1850, followed by a new Plum Island lighthouse in 1896, and hundreds of stranded vessels were hauled off the rocks and refloated. Once the canal opened, many sailing captains kept using the Door anyway rather than pay its tolls and tug fees. Ferries now cross daily to Washington Island. For all its reputation, the passage is not recorded as having killed a single sailor in the nineteenth century. Its victims were almost exclusively made of wood.