Fishtown in Lights 2025 Gallery
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Fishtown’s Shanties
Fishtown is a unique historical attraction composed of weather-beaten fishing shanties and small shops lining the mouth of the Leland River. The site has endured and adapted over the last 150 years as an ever-evolving working waterfront that still operates as one of the only unmodernized commercial fishing villages in the state of Michigan.
Click to see the shanty photo gallery
One of the most important characteristics of Fishtown is its core of historic shanties. Though only a few are still used for commercial fishing operations, most of the structures in Fishtown had their origins as commercial fishing buildings. These buildings served many purposes, including net-mending sheds, ice houses, smoke houses, and storage. Though processes like ice-making are now mechanized in a commercial fishery, running a fishery still requires extensive space for equipment storage and net repairs.
Many buildings have come and gone from the Fishtown landscape with the changing fortunes of the industry, yet Fishtown survives as a rare working waterfront and an authentic and active commercial fishing village.
The ebb and flow of Fishtown – Summer Meyer, Fishtown Preservation Staff
It’s funny how certain places weave in and out of your life—ebb and flow—only to anchor themselves more deeply than we ever expected. My first memories of Fishtown aren’t sharp images so much as feelings. Nostalgia seems to work that way—sometimes the emotions come back stronger than the details. When I was growing up, my […]
Showing someone Fishtown for the first time.
When you show someone Fishtown for the very first time, where do you begin? At the end of October, two local TV reporters came to report on Fishtown. Visit to Fishtown and Leland are almost rite of passage for reporters new to this region, and for both it would be their first visits. By this […]
My First Fishtown Day – Amanda Holmes, FPS Executive Director
I first actually saw Fishtown on a gray winter’s day in 2007. I wanted to walk the snowy docks and take in the Fishtown landscape before a meeting, because that meeting was with the board of the Fishtown Preservation Society, which had just completed the purchase of Fishtown from the Carlson family. It was February […]