About this site

This is an independent archive of the Wisconsin's Schooner Coast website, which promoted sixty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline from Manitowoc to Sturgeon Bay between about 2011 and 2015. It is not the original website, and it is not an official tourism office, museum, city or chamber of commerce.

Who runs it

The Schooner Coast Archive is a small volunteer project. It has no connection to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, the Door County Maritime Museum, Travel Wisconsin, any convention and visitors bureau or any of the businesses named in the original pages. Where those organizations still exist, the archive links to their official websites, and their own pages are the place for current hours, prices and bookings.

What was restored

The original site ran on the TYPO3 content management system and went offline around 2015. Every content page that the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine captured has been restored at its original address, with the same trailing-slash URLs the old site used: 57 pages in all, including the home page, the Plan Your Visit, Experience Natural Waters, See Maritime Landmarks & History and Enjoy Our Events sections, and the archived event listings from 2011 to 2013. Each page uses the best complete capture available, mostly from May 2015, and says at the bottom which capture it came from.

The design follows the site as it looked in February 2015: the logo, tagline, navigation buttons, slideshow, map and page frames are the original graphics recovered from the archive. The script headline typeface is an open-licensed stand-in for the original's commercial font, and the layout has been rebuilt in modern code so it works on phones.

Original text is kept as written. Typos were corrected, dead links were removed or updated after a link check in November 2026, and the following were taken out: forms and coupons, tracking scripts, a social media widget, e-mail addresses and a few sentences naming a private family and their home.

What was not recoverable

  • The Lighthouses and Subs, Tugs & Car Ferries pages were never captured. Both addresses now carry new pages written in 2026, clearly marked as such.
  • Most of the site's own photographs, including the full-width background photos of each section, were not archived. The ones that survived are used where they appeared; the backgrounds have been replaced with openly licensed photographs, credited below and in each page's "Enjoy the view" tab.
  • The Savings Passport PDF, the e-newsletter, the trip giveaway form and several event detail pages are gone. The pages that described them survive as archived promotions: the Savings Passport, the Win a Trip contest and the E-News sign-up.

What was added in 2026

Below many restored pages there is a boxed section marked Added in 2026: what has changed since the page was written, National Register of Historic Places status, a few sourced facts and answers to common questions. 29 pages have one. There are also 8 longer Coast Guides on shipwrecks, lighthouses, the Christmas Tree Ship, USS Cobia and the coast's working boats, the schooner Denis Sullivan, salmon fishing and a three-day route.

Everything in those additions comes from public sources, named at the bottom of each section: the National Register of Historic Places, NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, the Wisconsin Historical Society and its Wisconsin Shipwrecks database, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Wikipedia and Wikidata, and the museums and organizations concerned. Facts were checked in November 2026. Things change, so treat practical details as a starting point.

Privacy

The archive has no forms, accounts, comments, advertising or third-party trackers, and it does not collect e-mail addresses.

Photo credits

Photographs captioned on the original site (for example by Tom Skubal and the Lester Public Library) keep their original credits. Images added in 2026 come from Wikimedia Commons under the licenses shown; public-domain images are marked as such.

Please visit the Wisconsin Maritime Museum & the Door County Maritime Museum

Original text ©2011–2015 Wisconsin's Schooner Coast. Archive edition and 2026 additions ©2026 Schooner Coast Archive.