Kewaunee County and Its Ancient Shorelines

It was during the periods of glaciations and melting that the Great Lakes were born. Not as we know them, however. During glaciations, re-advances of shifting ice altered configurations to give us the lakes we know today. That story is told all along Lake Michigan where shorelines hold records of extinct high level lakes called Nipissing, Algonquin and Chicago. The complicated history of these lakes – especially Nipissing and Algonquin – affects most of what we know as the Great Lakes today.

Natural processes marred and even destroyed those records over millions of years, but there was still much of Lake Michigan's western shore left to investigate during a U.S. geological study in 1907. Changes have been significant in the last 100 years too, but now many of the changes can also be attributed to population growth along the lake.

Those living along the lake shore today recognize changes he or she has experienced within their own lifetime. Cycles are said to be about 50 years, however there are shorter cycles within the longer term. Were Kewaunee County residents of 1850s to return, they’d wonder what happened to the steep banks along Lake Michigan. Most of Kewaunee County is situated above the lake bluffs, just as it always was. It’s just that those bluffs have been so worn down. The bluffs of 1850 or 1900 didn’t compare with those in the narrations of ridges and terrains compiled nearly 200 years earlier by explorers such as Samuel de’ Champlain, Jean Nicolet and Claude Allouez, or even by the captains of sloops Archangel, Welcome and Felicity patrolling Lake Michigan during the War of 1812, less than 50 years before first settlement.

In 1900, the clay bluffs that rose from 20 to 40 feet above the shore in the southern part of Kewaunee County became as high as 80’ near the City of Kewaunee. By 1900, the shorelines detailed in 1834 by surveyors Joshua Hathaway and Sylvester Sibley had disappeared. Those living in Kewaunee County during its first 50 years witnessed that disappearance, probably not thinking much about it in their effort to tame a wilderness and get on with a new life. In fact, the coordinates on the site document request for the post office known as Sandy Bay ll suggest the post office would be in Lake Michigan today. At the time of the 1907 survey, an ancient forest bed was found in the lake near the Manitowoc-Kewaunee County line. Walking the shore today, one can discern trees and stumps in the till. Stream terraces give scientists an indication of lake levels in time gone by, and the creek called Mashek’s near Rostok in the Town of Pierce suggests the lake was at one time 35’ higher than it was during the 1907 U.S. Geological Survey. From what was the community of Alaska Pier, at about the site of the 1870 Alaska post office (now Three Mile Creek), one could look south toward the Rostok shore and see the step-like profile of the old creek.

Before Kewaunee’s first long pier was built in the 1850s, the bluffs were receding. As the piers were built, sand and gravel pushed in thus developing new, flatter areas along the shore. Acres of water and dry land were changing there, a change that became apparent along many places in Kewaunee County’s lake shore. This early 1900s postcard gives an indication of Kewaunee's lake bluffs of the time.

From the southeast corner of Section 9 in Pierce to Algoma, the bluff continues. There were dunes to the north of Pierce’s Section 9 and in Section 3. The shore road, on the bluff, followed a ridge of gravel, illustrated in the photo below.

Most of Algoma is built on a terrace created from lake deposits of gravel and stratified sand, the old delta of the Ahnapee River in a much earlier stage. Steep bluffs enclosed the sand flats north and south of the river, and wave action destroyed the headlands just north of today’s north pier. Bluffs north of Algoma surpassed those to its south.

Moving north toward today’s Door County Town of Clay Banks, the old bluff was 80 to 100’ with a 50 degree slope at the time of the 1907 survey. As the survey points out, there is nowhere in Eastern Wisconsin where there are bluffs to compare with those in Clay Banks. Near the east-west road in Section 6 of the Town of Ahnapee, the shore road descended from the bluff to the sandy terrain at the base. At Foscoro post office ½ mile farther north, a large creek with a broad flood plain entered the lake through a large gap in the bluffs. The village of Foscoro, on the Door-Kewaunee County line, was then on a 70’ bluff.

In so many places gaps in the bluff indicate creek terraces. Those creeks were lost as the bluffs were eaten back. Recorded history tells us about the early Bohemian settlers arriving at Mashek’s Creek in the 1850s. History tells us about the two Carlton settlements called Sandy Bay, one being renamed Carlton.  Casco Pier, now called Three Mile Creek, Silver Creek and Foscoro, now Stony Creek, are other examples of major creeks remaining in 1900. Just as the postal communities at those sites disappeared with the advent of RFD in 1904, by 2014 the creeks have almost disappeared.

The Kewaunee and Ahnapee Rivers are the county’s major rivers. They are nothing like they were in 1900, or when the earliest settlers began arriving in 1851. By settlement the rivers had changed from fewer than 20 years before when the area was being surveyed. As for a suspected old river of my youth – I know where it is, but few others could find it today.

This blogger has been studying Algoma’s lakefront and the Ahnapee River for more than 40 years and Kewaunee’s flats more recently. It was a picture of family land found in the 1907 survey that prompted thinking about the old shorelines. I grew up playing on that land, which had been virtually unmarred over all those years. How could I be so sure it was the same area? One recognizes the place in which one spends most of life. Then too, there were the house and farm buildings, identical to family photos. The house that was recently torn down had not changed since the survey picture was taken just after 1900. As an adult I felt that which we called the cattle pass – the huge culvert under the highway allowing cows to go from the lake side to the west side of the highway – was an old river. Imagine my surprise to learn via the accidental discovery of the geologic study that it actually was. Though there have been numerous geological studies, it was the accidental finding of the photo that intrigued me.

For a more detailed description of Foscoro, see the blog "Foscoro: A Village that Was."

Sources: An-An-api-sebe: Where is the River?, c. 2001; Commercial History of Algoma, Wisconsin Vol. 1, c. 2006;  Here Comes the Mail: Post Offices of Kewaunee County c. 2001; The Abandoned Shore Lines of Eastern Wisconsin, c. 1907; postcards and Hathaway’s correspondence in the blogger’s collection.