Door County Maritime Museum (Sturgeon Bay)

Local commercial fishermen founded this museum on July 5, 1969, in Gills Rock — worried that shipwreck artifacts and pieces of the region's fishing history were leaving the peninsula for good. What they built now draws around 95,000 visitors a year across three locations. The Sturgeon Bay site sits on the working waterfront, with galleries covering anglers, ship captains, and lighthouse keepers, plus tours of the restored steam tugboat John Purves, built in 1919. The water outside the windows is the same water that kept this county alive.