Wisconsin has two communities called Whitefish Bay. One is our leafy lakeside village of nearly 14,000 people just north of Milwaukee, with coffee shops on Silver Spring, kids walking and biking to school (for outsiders, we have no school buses here!) and a small town feel with easy access to a major metro area. The other is an unincorporated community on a quiet stretch of Lake Michigan tucked into the Town of Sevastopol in Door County, known more for a scenic rustic road and the Whitefish Dunes State Park. Both have property values that may make your eyes water and both owe their name to the same fish. And that fish, it turns out, is in serious trouble.
The Whitefish
The story of both Whitefish Bays starts the same way: with commercial fishermen hauling nets full of lake whitefish from remarkably productive waters.
In Milwaukee County, early settlers set up a commercial fishing operation in the adjacent bay of Lake Michigan, and the frequency with which they caught whitefish there suggested a name for the community. The name stuck, and when residents incorporated as a village in 1892 — primarily to start their own school district after the Town of Milwaukee declined villagers’ request to build a school closer to home — they kept it. That made Whitefish Bay Milwaukee County’s very first incorporated village.
Up in Door County, the story is similar. As early as 1838, Whitefish Bay was mentioned in ships’ log books, with a schooner named the Gazelle referring to it as Fisherman’s Bay. The area had been a fishing ground long before European settlers arrived. The book Door County’s Emerald Treasure explains that Native Americans called the place Ah-Quas-He-Ma-Ganing, meaning “save our lives,” a name that speaks to how vital the bay was for their survival.
So which came first? With one village incorporated and the other unincorporated, there may not actually be a knowable answer! The 1881 book History of Door County shares that Whitefish Bay Door County held one of the earliest established fishing settlements in the state dating back to the 1830s. So Door County’s Whitefish Bay may have a deeper documented fishing history, appearing in maritime records well before Milwaukee County’s village was even incorporated. But both names grew organically from the same source: waters so full of whitefish that no one needed to think very hard about what to call the place.
The Other Whitefish Bay You’ve Heard of — Even If You Didn’t Know It
There’s a third Whitefish Bay in the region that deserves a mention, and there’s a good chance you’ve heard it referenced without realizing it. Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior straddles the Michigan and Ontario border and was immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The song recounts the 1975 sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in a violent Lake Superior storm with 29 men aboard. The lyric “does anyone know where the love of God goes / when the waves turn the minutes to hours / The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay / if they’d put fifteen more miles behind her” refers to the ship’s desperate attempt to reach the shelter of Whitefish Bay before the storm overtook her. She never made it.
The Fish That Named Two Towns Is Struggling
Here’s the uncomfortable footnote to all of this: the whitefish that gave both communities their names has been quietly disappearing from the very waters where it once thrived.
The commercial harvest of lake whitefish in Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan has dropped from a peak of about 1.7 million pounds in 1999 to less than 200,000 pounds in 2024, a decline of nearly 90 percent. Todd Stuth, owner and operator of Baileys Harbor Fish Company shared with Wisconsin Public Radio that invasive zebra and quagga mussels are likely the greatest driver in the decline. The filter-feeding mussels have disrupted the food chain by consuming the food that larval whitefish rely on to survive, and without that replenishment of young fish, the population has seen a steep and continuous decline. There is some good news as the Green Bay whitefish population has seen a meaningful recovery since the early 2000s, offering a bright spot and a potential model for what restoration might look like elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it’s safe to say that we will not be eating a locally caught whitefish fish fry or boil at Jack Pandl’s anytime soon.
Both Whitefish Bays carry a name that alluded to the importance of the fish to the people who first resided in the areas. Whether that name will mean anything to the waters themselves in another generation is a question that scientists, fishers, and regulators are hoping to answer.
What do you think, Bay Neighbor?