speaker-0: Hello and welcome to the Door County Pulse podcast. I'm Myles Danhausen Jr. And today we're talking about a cool opportunity this weekend at Door County Maritime Museum down in Sturgeon Bay and some kind of really impressive information coming from the last year or so and some of the expansion things that have happened at the Maritime Museum. And who better to talk to me about this than Sam Perlman, the Deputy Director and Development Manager for the Maritime Museum who's been here through a lot of the Exciting new changes down there. So Sam, welcome to the podcast. Long time friend, first time podcast guest. Sam, thanks for coming in and short notice. You guys have a community appreciation weekend coming up at at the Maritime Museum down in Sturgeon Bay. ⁓ And

speaker-1: Thank you very much, Miles. Pleasure to be here. Yes, indeed.

speaker-0: a lot of cool opportunities for people to go check it out and we'll get into more of that, but just tell me what the activities this weekend are about.

speaker-1: So this is the first time we've ever done something like this. 2025 was a record year for the Door County Maritime Museum. we achieved a number of notable landmarks in the history of our organization. And really we wanted to say thank you. This is an amazing maritime community and it has been incredibly supportive of this organization for over five decades. And we really wanted to say thanks to the community. And the best way that we could think of to say thanks was to open our doors free to the public for this coming holiday weekend. So this Friday and Saturday, we it is free admission to the Door County Maritime Museum in Sturgeon Bay. We're open 10am to 4pm both days. There will be some fun activities from our education department for our younger guests. So there will be I think our education person Andrea is coming up with some cool things. I think there might be some Easter egg hunts. There might be some scavenger hunts. There'll be an opportunity to sign up for our summer camp programs. We're going to offer discounted admission or discount, I'm sorry, discounted museum memberships over the course of the next two days. If folks are able to experience the museum maybe for the first time and then really enjoy it and say, hey, I want to be a member of this museum. You can do that at a discounted rate. Our Death's Door Mariner Store, which is the museum stores across all three museum locations, they're going to have some sales, they're going to have some discounts. So all sorts of things are happening. Again, to thank this community for the incredible support that they have given to the Door County Maritime Museum. One other thing we're going to have we are renovating completely renovating one of what we call the legacy galleries So the building in sturgeon Bay that's on the waterfront That was built in 1996 open to the public in 97 there for main galleries And then we built the Jim Crest maritime lighthouse tower expansion in the in the 2020s the legacy galleries are undergoing complete overhauls. Last year, we opened the Baumgartner Gallery, the Sentinels of the Door exhibit all about the US Coast Guard. This year, we're redoing the Peterson Gallery, and we're going to have the Peterson Gallery is not yet ready to be open to the public. But we're going to have show some previews and some images of what that's going to look like. So the Peterson Gallery is going to tell the Peterson Builder story. It's going to have for the first time, a dedicated temporary and traveling exhibit space for the museum. And we will be announcing very soon what the very first exhibition that's going to be in that temporary space. And the thing that I'm really excited about and you personally are going to be very excited about is we're going to have a young Mariners gallery. So there is going to be a dedicated space in our museum for the first time dedicated to our youngest guests. So there's going to be some cool interactive things. The Safeway container is going to be there and that's going to have some interactives there. We're going to demonstrate sort of how the Safeway container works because there will be some foam blocks. custom made foam blocks that look like a Safeway shipping container that you can stack one on top of another and you can stack into the frame of a boat or on the frame of a train or on the frame of a truck. You know, we don't think about it because everything we get every look you look around wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. And pretty much everything that you have came to us in a container truck. The there is a very, very strong argument.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: that the invention of containerized shipping was invented right here in Sturgeon Bay by Latham D. Smith. Coming out of the Second World War, that technology, unfortunately he passed away before he was able to patent it, but that's an amazing, amazing story. And that's just one of the great stories that we love to share at the Maritime Museum because we, more than anything, we love to let people realize and recognize that this tiny peninsula, in the middle of Wisconsin, in the middle of the Great Lakes, has had a global impact for hundreds and hundreds of years.

speaker-0: It's pretty wild. Like when you talk about the Safeway, the shipping container, and to me, it was always shocking that that had to be invented, right? Like it just, it's so obvious, but somebody invented that. And like you said, there was a patent dispute at the time, but like Latham Smith, he invented it. I'm going to say that.

speaker-1: He did. mean, he invented the idea of taking goods, especially soft goods, know, sacks of flour, grain, whatever, putting them in a square container that could be stacked one on top of another. He designed and built a custom ship so that in order to effectively stack them on to the ship, and then you take those things by crane off of that ship, put them onto a truck, put them onto a train. It's what we call multimodal transportation. We see it every single day. We see trucks on the highway. We see trains hauling across the Midwest. You go out. I was just at a major seaport ⁓ in Europe and you see vast, vast acres of container ships being loaded on and off of ocean going vessels. And again, all of that was really pioneered right here in Sturgeon Bay, right here in

speaker-0: It's so wild when I when I heard about that and read about that and of course there's the things and the ships that were built here for World War two that's the impact on the Great Lakes there's there's so many different aspects of it and You know all these activities and also I should note that If you're looking for something to do this weekend We have as of this morning three of the Easter egg hunts around the county have been canceled Bailey's Harbor Jacksonport and Ellison Bay as of right now as I'm talking Brussels is still doing their sister Bay is still doing theirs And there's a couple of others off top my head. I'm forgetting a couple. But if you're looking for something to do with your kids, this is a great opportunity to go and you if it's if it's raining and you want to get inside and still have them have some fun. ⁓ I've taken my three kids to the Maritime Museum. They loved it. And we went we made it through about half of the tower rooms before they started to peter out. like there's some interactive stuff there. And that's great. Like what you talked about having even more stuff, interactive stuff for young kids. And if you haven't been Forget about the tower. If you just haven't been in the museum, it's an incredible small time museum. And then you add the tower to it. And it's really, it's a maritime tower. It's a maritime history. But there's so much about just Door County in general beyond just like, if you're thinking of it, that it's like, ⁓ this is the story of boats, or this is the story of fishing that it's so much more than

speaker-1: We like to tell you all the time, all Door County history is maritime history. We are surrounded by water. We have been since the, you know, since the glaciers have retreated. Everyone has come here by or because of the water. The First Nations people came here by water and they came because of the water. There is fresh water. There was fish. There was abundant wildlife. There was abundant plants, flora and fauna. Why do people come here today? Well, they want to have a drink by the water. They want to go to the beach. They want to be on a boat. ⁓ It's water. We say water defines us. Water is 100 % why people come here and they always have and they will continue to do so. So again, all Door County history is maritime history.

speaker-0: And there's, another big piece of history is what you see when you're at the top of the tower. And growing up here, I always knew there was a canal there, but I just, you really know from a ground level and driving over those bridges over and over again, how it all interacts. And you go up on that tower and you can look one way and you see the canal and you're like, this is, ⁓ now I get the context of it. You look the other way and you can see the old stone quarry. You can see Pottawatomie State Park, can see the shipyards, and you see it all come together and then the city built around and sandwiched between all those things. It's a pretty remarkable sight. again, if you haven't been up to the top of that tower, that alone is worth a visit just to get this whole different perspective.

speaker-1: You know, and one of the things that we are celebrating by this community appreciation event is the amazing growth that we've had in attendance at the museum. I mean, we are now averaging across all three museum locations. We are now averaging 95,000 guests a year. Last year for the first time in our history, our admissions revenue topped the one million dollar mark. But we still hear from local residents all the time, ⁓ I've never been there or ⁓ I was there 20 years ago and I haven't been back since. And that's part of why we wanted to host this free community event, because we want people to come to the museum. It's your museum. It's not my museum. It's not Kevin's museum. It's not the staff's museum. It is the community's museum. It is your museum. And that's why we always talk about it is your Door County Maritime Museum. And we want you to come see it and experience it and learn the important history of this community. Because again, going back to the very first European traders who came to this area were trading with the native populations, the furs that they got, they didn't keep them themselves. They went to Europe. So again, starting in the 17th century, in the 1600s, stuff from Wisconsin, stuff from this peninsula was going around the world. You talked about the ships of World War Two. We talked about containers. What another great invention, the mobile boat hoist, taking a boat, recreational boat or any kind of boat, lifting it up out of the water and taking it into winter storage. And that used to be very difficult process. And then some folks here in Sturgeon Bay invented a thing that would drive out onto a pier lower down, scoop up a boat, pick it up and drive it away. And that is Marine Travel Lift. Marine Travel Lift invented the concept of a mobile boat hoist invented here in Sturgeon Bay right here in Door County. That company continues today. It is the worldwide leader in mobile boat hoist. There are thousands of those blue boat hoists all around the world. I believe that there is a Marine Travel Lift. operating on every continent except Antarctica. And I know that they're working on trying to get one down there as well. I mean, and all of them built here in Sturgeon Bay, maintained in Sturgeon Bay, the parts are, you know, replacement parts made and delivered from Sturgeon Bay. Again, an incredible global impact.

speaker-0: ⁓ I think, so my impression before I had gone to the Maritime Museum, I was probably in my 20s the first time I went there. Didn't go there as a kid, grown up. And my thinking was, okay, this is like our small local museum. And it is, but when you go in the doors, the displays are so professional, everything is done so well. And it, it's like you're going into like a museum in a major city. It's just a smaller building.

speaker-1: We want to be a world-class museum because that's what this community deserves. We're a world-class community. We should have a world-class museum.

speaker-0: What is something maybe that people don't know about the museum that they should? or one of your favorite displays that maybe people don't know about.

speaker-1: You know, there are a bunch of things along the lines that we've already talked about. One of our favorite things to do as museum professionals, as museum leadership, we take the name tags off every once in a while, especially when the building is kind of crowded and we just walk around and observe people interacting with all of the exhibits. And our favorite phrase, bar none, our favorite phrase was, wow, I didn't know that. And we hear that frequently.

speaker-0: You must hear it a ton in there because I, as somebody who has written a thousand articles about this peninsula and has interviewed so many people involved in so many businesses, especially the maritime history, but so many historical articles. I'm saying that all the time when I'm in there. Right.

speaker-1: And that's the key is to be able to just kind of wow people. when they hear that, when they read something and they go, wow, I never knew that. But I want to pick up on something you said. You never came to the museum as a kid. And that is a problem. And I mentioned earlier, we have an education program coordinator. For the last four years at the museum, Andrea Strohmeyer has been our dedicated education program coordinator and she has done an amazing job. But that is a huge, huge point of emphasis for our organization is making sure we are, yes, we are here to preserve, but also celebrate and educate about the maritime history of Door County. and we were doing it kind of in fits and starts previously. Now it is a dedicated focus of our organization. So we love it when we have school groups coming into the museum, taking field trips. We do outreach to all the school districts. want to, my vision is that every K through 12 student has at least three experiences with the Maritime Museum at elementary, middle and high school level. And we're definitely making a lot of ground and gaining towards that. having someone dedicated to doing that, because it takes time. It takes time to develop programs, to get ⁓ school districts engaged.

speaker-0: Yeah, build those relationships so you become part of that curriculum and something that a class or a grade looks forward to. ⁓ this year in this grade, now you get to go to this, you know.

speaker-1: Exactly. So programs like our underwater robotics program, the SeaPerch program, which Washington Island has fully embraced. now they're sending yet another two teams to the international competition. Our cardboard regatta, which is just a hoot to watch. It is so much fun to see teams of young middle schoolers working together to try and design and build a boat out of cardboard and hot glue and

speaker-0: That is pretty

speaker-1: put it in the water at the pool and see if it works. ⁓ It's just fantastic. But we want to have that kind of engagement. And it's not just public schools. We want it to be parochial schools, homeschoolers. We've we definitely have seen an uptick in the number of homeschoolers who are coming to the museum and engaging with us. And it's not just Door County. want it to be. Keewanee County, Brown County. ⁓ Yes, we are the Door County Maritime Museum. But we see ourselves as a resource for all 72 counties in the state of Wisconsin. And Andrea is even working on outreach to school districts in Illinois and Minnesota. So yeah, that is a core, core part of who we are and what we want to be.

speaker-0: ⁓ You mentioned earlier the three different sites, and I think a lot of people may not know what you're talking about when you refer to the multiple sites, but a lot of people probably only know of the one at the foot of the bridge in Sturgeon Bay. What are the three sites? How are they different? How do you manage those?

speaker-1: So we have, like you said, three sites, the Death's Door Maritime Museum up in Gills Rock. So our organization was actually founded in the northern tip of the peninsula back in the 1960s. 1969 is when we were founded ⁓ up in Gills Rock. So we still have a small museum presence up there. It's a great little museum. talks a lot about the fishing history of ⁓ Door County and specifically of Northern Door. We talk about the shipwrecks. Obviously the story of Port de Mort, there's the fishing tug Hope is inside the museum and it's fully accessible. You can walk around and go into it and on it. ⁓ There's a beautiful sculpture of a commercial fisherman outside of the museum right out front. that's that was really that's location number one for our organization.

speaker-0: I should note, next door to it, if you got young kids, there's a great old school wooden playground that my kids love. It's one of my favorite. And it's not like the big modern thing that you see in some of the playgrounds we've built now, but I love the old school ones that you're like, all right, local guys built this thing.

speaker-1: 100%. Absolutely. And then ⁓ we operate and manage the Cana Island Lighthouse on behalf of the County Parks Department. So the Maritime Museum has had an association with Cana Island since the early 1970s. And then when the county took over ownership in the early 2000s, we just moved our working relationship from the Coast Guard over to the county. And that was the point at which Cana became what it is today, which is a fully accessible museum space. Before that time, know, early 2000s, you couldn't just walk out to Cana Island and have full access to it. Once the county took it over, we engaged with an architectural firm to create what's called a historic structures report. That report laid out a four point plan, a four phase plan to make Cana Island a fully accessible museum site. And That's what started happening really, you know, around 2008, 2009. And it didn't finish really until 2022. It took almost a dozen, over a dozen years for that plan to be fully, fully implemented because first we had to take care of the outside of the lighthouse and clean that up. And then we had to do the outbuildings. Then it was buying a piece of property on the peninsula side. creating the parking so that we would be more accessible and so that you wouldn't have dozens of cars parking in people's driveways and making the neighbors unhappy.

speaker-0: Now you need to put a generator in an emergency shelter out there in we get another storm.

speaker-1: That's a whole other set. That was quite a thing indeed. But then it was building the Welcome and Interpretive Center and that was open to the public in 2020. Once we did that, then we were able to take all the commercial stuff like the museum store and admissions out of the Keepers Quarters, put that into the Welcome and Interpretive Center and then in 2022 did the interior restoration of Cana Island. And once we did that and reopened the Keepers Quarters in August of 22, that's when we had basically and effectively completed all four phases of that original Historic Structures Report. And so that's what we have today. You know, an amazing, amazing location. You know, I said last year we welcomed over 95,000 guests across all three museum locations. 65,000 of that is Canaan.

speaker-0: I mean, Cana Island's got to be one of the most photographed places for a very remote spot,

speaker-1: But it like I said, 65,000 guests out there and they have to want to get out there. I mean, you have to leave. If you are driving up here, you leave a U.S. interstate. You get on a state highway, then you get on a county highway and then you get on a little town road to get out. And then you have to get out of your car and walk 100 yards across the causeway or ride the the tractor and hay wagon. I mean, you got to really want to get out there and people do it. And sixty five thousand is what we count. Yeah, you know that there are people who go out there after hours. ⁓ And then going back to the original question. yes. And then our Sturgeon Bay location, that is our third location. ⁓ And behind this museum in Sturgeon Bay, we also have ⁓ the largest artifact in our collection and the only in water exhibit we have, which is

speaker-0: Blue just down.

speaker-1: the tug John Purvis. So the tug John Purvis, Cane Island Lighthouse and the Death's Door Maritime Museum are all open seasonally May 1 to October 31. It's the museum in Sturgeon Bay as our main campus that is open year round. And that's again why that's why we are hosting our community appreciation event this weekend, this Friday and Saturday with free admission for all in Sturgeon Bay.

speaker-0: And what are the times for that on Friday and Saturday? And, you know, from the outside in, I would guess that like the biggest opportunity for growth for you guys is that Sturgeon Bay location. And I'm thinking just because Cana Island, I'm sure you have to deal with problems of like, all right, how do we handle the number of people who come out there and this place that's not necessarily built for, like you said.

speaker-1: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days.

speaker-0: It's a remote spot. is it's awesome that people go out there, but there's only so much you can handle and some of these tiny little roads. But the Maritime Museum offers so much and that's their surgeon bay location. The tower is such a cool, not just the views, but there's so much that you can learn going in there. If you are new to Door County, if you just bought a house here, or you're like everybody else and you want to you want to feel like a local. I think that's one of the aside from listening to this podcast. I think that's one of the fastest ways You could go spend two hours and you would walk out of there with so many historical and not just historical, like modern day factoids that you could spit out in conversation and sound like somebody who knows what the heck you're talking about.

speaker-1: I don't disagree with you. mean, when you especially when we built the Jim Crest maritime lighthouse tower, the tower experience begins with that little 12 minute introductory film on the ground floor. And then you take the elevator up to the top and you work your way down each themed floor of exhibits. Will you watch that you sit there and watch that 12 minute movie and yeah, you get a great, great kickstart of your Door County history education right in that 12 minutes. It really takes you literally from the the glacier ⁓ origins of the peninsula and from the ice age all the way up to where we are right now.

speaker-0: And you know what's cool about some of the Door County history is it's not just building histories, like the building themselves and a date or something was signed on this date. That's not interesting. That's just dust, right? In a lot of ways. And I read this book, ⁓ James Lowen wrote it, Lies My Teacher Told Me. he had, it's probably 30 years old now, but it was one of these books that really changed my mind about history. I've always been interested in it. But what he said is one of the disservices we do is we teach history as dates and years and things like and just names instead of the stories. And you look at what are our great movies, great, our favorite movies, they're historical stories, but we just tell them as movies. And oftentimes we don't teach history the same way. County actually, if you start diving in, like the Robert Noble story is wild. You know, there's a lot of really fascinating stories of people, especially the pioneers and the things they went through the lighthouse keeper stories and ⁓ some of the shipwrecks and all this. There's really dramatic, interesting storytelling in our history that I think you can absorb in those shipyards too. And ⁓ some of it's, you know, it's still alive today. You like you talk about the commercial fishing in Northern Door and the Weeborg family, the Henriksen family. And speaking of the Weeborg family, just lost the Mark Weeborg, who has been a a stalwart of Northern Door for his entire life.

speaker-1: And it was part of the Maritime Museum. mean, his family was part of the origins of the Door County Maritime Museum. Mark served on the board up until very recently. He just resigned, retired from the board a couple, not even two years ago. So, I mean, he was actively engaged. He was on the board when I got to the museum in 2018. So, yeah, he's been a big part of this community for a long, long time. And we're very, very sad. you know, we send all of our best wishes to his family because he, you He lives a huge hole.

speaker-0: Yeah, huge hole. And now you have he was a fourth generation, fifth generation still doing it. even that those ties to the the origins of our of our story here, when you talk about commercial fishing and what people did to survive when they first got

speaker-1: And that was that's one of the stories that we tell at the death door Maritime Museum, ⁓ know I'll be honest I had been to before I started working at the Maritime Museum I had been to the museum in sturgeon Bay, but I had and I'd been to Cana Island I had never been to the death door Maritime Museum before I started working for the organization and now I'm like this is a great little museum and yeah, we do talk in detail about the commercial fishing history the There's a great exhibit up there called from net to table and it literally release shows that story from how the commercial fish how the whitefish that is on your plate tonight, how it got there starting this morning at you know, the guys who woke up the Charlie Hendrixons or Mark Weeborgs who got up at four o'clock three o'clock in the morning, were out on their boats, they're pulling those nets, they're processing that fish. And it literally gets to your plate and that lovely young person who brings it to your table that night. I mean, That's the story that we tell and it's a great photography exhibit. We talk about all the fishing families and the intermarriages and the relationships between all of those northern door fishing families. All of that is told at the Death Star Maritime Museum up in Gills Rock.

speaker-0: Well, it's really exciting to see like this, the museum's evolution. And I really appreciate the introspection on the part of the museum to go, how do we, how do we reach out? How do we find more people? How do we not just sit back and wait for people to come, but how do we engage with them? Because that investment that's been made there, the things that you guys have done are really, it's like, again, it's so professionally done. It's so much more if you've never been in there. It's so much more than you would expect to find. So kudos to you guys. again, 10 to four, Friday and Saturday, customer appreciation, appreciation, community appreciation days, sorry. And free admission, lots of stuff for kids and families. But then if you can't make it this weekend, I really encourage people to make it a part of a future visit, whether you live here or you're coming up here. It's it's just like I said, a great way to learn more about the county.

speaker-1: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much,