09/12/2026
🍁❤️😎
Fishtown in Leland is not a museum, it is not a recreation, and it is not a movie set. Those shanties are still working buildings. 🎣
They went up in the 1800s and they have leaned over the Leland River on the same wooden pilings ever since. Ice houses, net sheds, smokehouses. Commercial fishermen ran whitefish and lake trout out of that channel back when Great Lakes fishing was one of the biggest industries in the state, and a couple of boats still go out today.
It survived because people fought for it. A nonprofit bought the entire village in 2007 specifically so it would not become condominiums, then spent years jacking the buildings up and replacing the rotted pilings underneath them.
Walk the boardwalk on a September evening when the light comes straight down the channel from the lake and the smokehouse is going, and you understand why they bothered. Weathered gray wood, gulls, diesel, cold water. 🌅
Have you been to Fishtown, and did you get the smoked whitefish while you were there?
