Hardy Gallery in Ephraim
1868 Eagle Bluff Lighthouse
Wilson’s Restaurant in Ephraim
Ephraim’s first firehouse
The following morning, we explored the park for a couple of hours and then set out north again to see some more of the peninsula. Arriving in Ephraim (pronounced EE-from), a picture-perfect whitewashed Moravian settlement dating to 1853 that tumbles down a hill to a harbor bobbing with sail boats, we could clearly see why Door County is so often compared to New England’s Cape Cod. We walked through Harborside Park along the town’s gracefully curved waterfront and continued on to the pier where Anderson’s Barn, an old graffiti-adorned warehouse, serves as home to the Hardy Gallery featuring exhibits by local artists. With the noon hour approaching, our thoughts turned to lunch, and in Ephraim there’s no better choice of eateries than Wilson’s Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlor. A Door County institution since 1906, Wilson’s, with its red-and-white-striped awnings, old-fashioned soda fountain, and booths with Wurlitzer juke boxes, is a throwback to an earlier era. We ordered patty melts and home-brewed root beer, topped off with an obligatory slab of cherry pie. It was like a trip back in time. If you have kids in tow, they’ll undoubtedly holler out for a stop at Ephraim’s 1930s Firehouse. A Deco-style
stone structure harboring a pair of vintage fire trucks, it was restored in 2009 and now serves as a museum. SR 42 continues north to the tip of the peninsula, and like most visitors, we couldn’t resist a visit to the “top of the thumb,” as locals call it. Our mission got derailed, however, just a few miles up the road in Sister Bay. We had to pay a visit to Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant, where the town’s most famous residents—a family of goats—can be seen grazing on Al’s sod-covered roof. Inside, dirndl-clad waitresses serve Swedish pancakes topped with lingonberries and drowning in whipped cream. We were in orchard country now and that mandated yet another stop—at Seaquist Orchards Farm Market— where we browsed a veritable cornucopia of Door-grown produce and farm products such as jams and jellies, juices, ciders, and baked goods. We left with some cherry preserves and a bottle of oh-so-tasty apple butter. Our next stop was Gills Rock, a hard-working New England-style fishing port at the edge of the peninsula, where we checked out the docks lined with nets and other fishing gear and then dropped by Bea’s Ho-Made Products. We watched Bea Landin and her crew brewing up a vat of cherry-apple jam as we nibbled on cherry
DOOR COUNTY
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2017
16
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