Before anyone called this place Door County, people lived here. The Potawatomi — Bo-De-Wad-Me, "keeper of the fire" — held the shores of Green Bay when Europeans arrived, and the strait those French explorers named Porte des Morts was already storied ground. At Whitefish Dunes, the evidence goes deeper still: eight successive prehistoric Native American villages, occupied in overlapping waves from 100 B.C. through the later 1800s, sit beneath the dunes on the National Register of Historic Places. The tallest dune, Old Baldy, rises 93 feet above ground that has held human presence for more than two thousand years. Potawatomi State Park in southern Door County carries the tribe's name forward — the federal government held the land for over ninety years before Wisconsin opened it as a park in 1928. The name on the sign is the least the place can offer.
