Historic Sandy Bay Pier earns spot on Wisconsin’s State Register of Historic Places

Water splash. PC: Fox 11 Online

TOWN OF CARLTON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A pier in Kewaunee County is now on listed in the State Register of Historic Places.

The Sandy Bay Pier is an early example of a resource crucial to Euro-American transformation of Kewaunee County and the Midwest. It represents the rural coastal heritage of the western coast of Lake Michigan and the infrastructure that facilitated the creation of the county’s agrarian economy during the Colonization era.

The pier served as a point of disembarkation, embarkation, export, import and resupply serving area residents and owners of the adjacent Sandy Bay sawmill and commercial complex before and after the 1854 Treaty of the Wolf River, when the forests of the northwestern Lake Michigan coast were opened for exploitation and Euro-American colonization. The pier represents a nexus where the lumber trade and immigration interfaced to permanently alter Kewaunee County’s landscape and economic system. Archaeological deposits around the pier have the potential to supplement historic records regarding the often-unnoted people who worked on the pier, trod its decks, and frequented the waters around it.