Waiting in Washburn

I confess: I loved Washburn long before I ever visited by boat. I first traveled to this lovely small town on Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay in January 2013, when I was selected to read some of my work with 15 other writers and poets at the WritersRead event held at StageNorth, the local theater, home of the StageNorth groundings. It was a snowy January night, and there was a Packers game on: I figured we’d get 10 people in the audience if we were lucky. But the house was packed. Afterwards, writers and artists, readers and art appreciators milled the lobby bar, chatting until very late into the evening.

I fell in love that night. Over the next seven years I returned again and again, sometimes multiple times a year, often staying at Blakely’s Hill House, a lovely farmhouse B&B, minus the breakfast. I cherished parking my car for the weekend and walking everywhere in town: The old Carnegie library and indie bookstore, the grocery store, restaurants and cafes. I wandered the old, tree-lined neighborhoods with Victorian homes and all along the Lake Superior lakefront. I loved the friendliness, the slowed pace, the easy accessibility of necessities and art, and the community spirit.

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, when we took our family of three kids cruising through the Apostle Islands aboard our 38-foot trawler Mazurka. We had no intention of visiting Washburn, but on our first morning, anchored just off Oak Island, something didn’t sound quite right when my husband Mark tried to start the engine.

Mark rushed around, looking for his phone. “The starter won’t shut off! Get Ed on the phone!” His brother, Ed, is a large diesel engine mechanic based in the Keweenaw, best friend to Mazurka’s Ford Lehman 120-hp, six-cylinder single engine. Within an hour, while I took the kids to the bow for snacks and books, they had deduced the problem and were able to jump-start the engine while our 10-year-old revved the throttle. We were on our way. “Ed will order us a new starter,” Mark told me, “Where should he send it?”

That was a no-brainer: “Washburn!”

In a few hours we entered Washburn harbor, greeted by teenagers jumping off the breakwall into the ice-cold water. The full-service Washburn Marina has plenty of transient slips, a ship store, picnic and grill, and an expansive boat repair facility. It’s within walking distance from just about everything, including the grocery store, downtown shops and restaurants, and the auto parts store where our new starter would be arriving soon.

Built on brownstone

Washburn was founded in 1883 on a hillside overlooking the Chequamegon Bay, in large part due to its protected harbor, ample forests and the availability of sandstone, also called “brownstone.” It quickly grew to be an important industrial and commercial town, as the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railroad needed a lake port. In 1885, the Northern Pine Land Company opened the first of three major mills along the lakefront. Logging railroads led from town to transport raw materials into the community’s saw mills. By the late 1880s, several brownstone quarries operated along the sandstone outcrops between Washburn and Bayfield. This vital building material was shipped by waterway to Chicago and was used to rebuild the city after the Great Chicago Fire.

Examples of the rich sandstone architecture can be found throughout Washburn. You can visit three brownstone buildings on the National Register of Historic Places: The Washburn Cultural Center, the Bayfield County Courthouse and the Washburn Public Library.

Washburn was named district headquarters of the Chequamegon National Forest almost a century ago. Today, these thousands of acres of national and county forests supply timber for the state’s forest products industry, along with all kinds of recreation opportunities. In town, the lakefront is well-loved, and a paved pathway connects two parks at either end of town, Memorial Park and Thompson’s West End Park, with a stop at the marina. Just north of town, Houghton Falls offers a jaw-dropping hike along a sandstone gorge that opens into Lake Superior and a view of the Apostles. Just outside of town, the more remote Long Lake (not to be confused with the large Long Lake Recreation Area in Washburn County) is circled by a flat hiking trail, plus a small swimming beach and picnic area.

Photos above: Felicia Schneiderhan