Imagine Door County 100 Years Ago

It was 1926.

Calvin Coolidge was president. A gallon of gasoline cost around 20 cents. Radios were becoming fixtures in American homes, talking pictures were just around the corner, and the Roaring Twenties were in full swing.

And here in Door County, a group of people decided that the stories of their community were worth saving.

On October 1, 1926, the Door County Historical Society was born.

It’s easy to look back at 1926 and think of it as “history.” But for the people who founded the Historical Society, the past they wanted to preserve wasn’t necessarily all that distant.

Civil War veterans were still living. Door County’s earliest European settlers were within living memory. Commercial fishing, farming, lumbering and shipping were part of everyday life. Automobiles were changing the way people traveled, but horses had hardly disappeared from the roads. Electricity and telephones were transforming homes and businesses, while many rural families still lived without conveniences we take completely for granted today.

Tourism was growing, too. Visitors had already discovered that there was something special about this peninsula. Peninsula State Park had been established only 17 years earlier, in 1909, and Door County was beginning its transformation into the destination generations of visitors would come to know and love.

Imagine what those first members of the Door County Historical Society would think if they could see the county today.

They would certainly recognize the shoreline, the bluffs, the orchards and many familiar community names. But they might be astonished by the traffic on a summer weekend, the number of visitors who come from across the country and around the world, and just how much Door County has changed.

They might also be surprised by what has survived.

Historic buildings still stand. Family photographs and letters have been preserved. Stories that might otherwise have disappeared have been recorded. Artifacts that once seemed like ordinary objects of everyday life now help us understand how earlier generations lived and worked.

And for 100 years, the Door County Historical Society has been part of that work.

What began in 1926 has grown into the organization we know today, caring for places like Eagle Bluff Light Station and Heritage Village, sharing programs and exhibits, preserving stories, conducting oral histories, and helping people connect with the generations who came before us.

That work matters because history doesn’t announce when it is about to disappear.

A photograph gets thrown away. A building comes down. A story that “everyone knows” is lost when the last person who remembers it is gone. Something commonplace today becomes something people wish they understood 50 years from now.

The people who gathered together in 1926 understood something important: a community’s history is worth saving.

One hundred years later, we are the beneficiaries of that decision.

And now it’s our turn.

As the Door County Historical Society prepares to celebrate its 100th birthday on October 1, we aren’t simply looking backward. We’re thinking about the next century, too. What stories are we preserving today? What will people in Door County want to understand about life in 2026 when they celebrate the Society’s 200th anniversary in 2126?

We can only imagine.

But perhaps, 100 years from now, someone will look back at photographs, recordings, documents and stories from our time and be grateful that someone thought they were worth saving.

Just as we are grateful to that small group of Door County residents who believed the same thing in 1926.

Here’s to the first 100 years—and to preserving the stories of Door County for the next 100.