A future new Door County museum will feature the historical importance of a local waterfront.
And it’ll help preserve a really cool old boat.
The Sister Bay Historical Society reached an agreement with the Village of Sister Bay in late April that will see the historical society create the Sister Bay Waterfront Museum in the former Bunda Boathouse at Sister Bay Marina.
Currently expected to open in 2027, the Waterfront Museum will be an extension of the historical society, which operates the very popular Corner of the Past Museum in Sister Bay with 14 buildings from the 1800s on the property tied to the area’s working and farming past, including Old Anderson House.
“The Waterfront Museum … represents a wonderful addition to our museum and our first foray away from our main campus [at Corner of the Past],” Sister Bay Historical Society president John Lijewski said in a news release. “We are delighted to have a presence in the heart of Sister Bay at the marina for all to enjoy.”
“Transforming the boathouse into the Sister Bay Waterfront Museum creates an opportunity to honor our maritime heritage in a central, highly visible location,” village administrator Benjamin Andrews said in the same news release. “We’re grateful for the dedication of the community members who helped make this possible, and we look forward to welcoming residents and visitors to this new cultural asset.”
The new museum will display artifacts and exhibits that highlight the history of Sister Bay’s waterfront and its impact on the development of the village. But the star of the show, Lijewski said to the Advocate, is expected to be the boat that will return to the boathouse where it once lived and where the museum will be located.
That boat is Shadow, a mahogany, 26-foot-long Chris-Craft runabout built in 1929 that’s been housed in Sister Bay for all of its 97 years, outside of transporting it from a Chicago boatyard to the village for original owner Arthur Friedland. Shadow had only two owners for most of its life: Friedland, who died in 1972, and local businessman Jack Bunda, who bought it from Friedland’s estate and owned it until he died in 2011.
According to the historical society, all the wood and the frame of the Shadow remains original. Through all its years, its most famous passenger likely was the Stanley Cup – Ruslan Fedotenko of the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins brought the NHL championship trophy to Door County, where he and his wife had a condo and he got to know Bunda, specifically to get a photo of the Cup on the boat after the Penguins won it all in 2009.
Bunda built a customized, state-of-the-art boathouse for Shadow, and that is where the Waterfront Museum will be. The boathouse was decommissioned and converted into an apartment after Shadow left, but the boat was in possession and care of Yacht Works in Sister Bay, so it’s lived its entire life in the village.
Preserving the Shadow and keeping it in Sister Bay was a large part of the impetus for creating a museum, Lijewski said. The historical society formed the Sister Bay Marina Club – “A small group of conscientious boaters who wanted to memorialize and show off that wonderful boat,” Lijewski said – to raise funds to buy the vessel, which has happened, and now the Marina Club will financially sponsor the renovation of the boathouse and ongoing operating expenses of the museum.
And while the spectacular mahogany boat may be the star of the museum, the coming displays on the history of the Sister Bay waterfront will be a vital part, Lijewski said.
“The intent is to tell the bigger story of our waterfront history while attempting to preserve that one piece of history [the Shadow],” he said.
Artifacts are still being gathered and exhibits will be determined by historical society curator Michaela Kraft, and Lijewski said the important thing is to show how much the waterfront mattered to the village’s history.
“If you think back, everything arrived in Door County via the water,” Lijewski said in an interview with the Advocate. “So, the waterfront was very important to the formation of Sister Bay and all the villages in Door County.
“The waterfront was the gateway to the village. Any farm production, any lumber production, any supplies coming in passed through the waterfront. Any people coming here, any tourists that came in passed through the waterfront. That’s how important it is. So many businesses here have their roots in the waterfront or depended on it.”
With the agreement to create the museum just reached a couple weeks ago, it’s too early for designs to have been drawn up, and the historical society is starting to come up with plans for how to renovate and remodel the boathouse. Lijewski noted Sister Bay doesn’t allow construction on buildings between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so any work on the project will wait until fall.
“There’s a number of things [regarding renovations] we’re just getting into right now,” Lijewski said. “We’re looking to do what we need to do to make it into a museum.”
For more information on the Sister Bay Waterfront Museum and the historical society, visit sisterbayhistory.org. For more on the Sister Bay Marina CLub, visit sisterbaymarinaclub.com.
Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 or cclough@usatodayco.com.
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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Sister Bay to get new museum with waterfront history, classic boat
Reporting by Christopher Clough, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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