Leland Fishtown
— grey shanties, smoke, and the smell of whitefish.
Not only on a wall.
Leland Fishtown, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A row of weathered grey fishing shanties on the Leland River where it spills into Lake Michigan. Carlson's still smokes whitefish over hardwood the way it has since the 1880s, and the Manitou Island ferries leave from the dock at the end of the lane. The river runs over the dam in a steady sheet. Gulls wheel above the pilings. Most of the buildings are older than the state highway that brought you here.
The place, in three passes.
Fishtown is a working historic fishing village at the mouth of the Leland River, in Leland on the Leelanau Peninsula's Lake Michigan shore. Commercial fishing here dates to the 1850s, and the surviving cluster of weathered shanties, smokehouses, and ice houses is one of the last intact fishing villages on the Great Lakes. Since 2007 the site has been owned and stewarded by the nonprofit Fishtown Preservation Society, which holds nine historic structures, two fishing tugs, and the dock. The Manitou Island Transit ferry to North and South Manitou leaves from the end of the lane.
There is no stone here. The vocabulary is wood, weather, and water. The shanties are cedar-sided, silvered by 140 years of lake wind, set on posts driven into the riverbank between the Leland River dam and the harbour mouth. Carlson's Fishery, the oldest continuously operating business, has smoked whitefish over hardwood on this site since 1904. The fish tugs Joy and Janice Sue are wooden, working boats, not museum pieces. The dam that pools the river upstream of the shanties dates to 1854 and gives the village its steady downstream pour.
Fishtown is open year-round and free to walk. The shops and smokehouse keep seasonal hours, with the fullest schedule from late May through mid-October. The Manitou Island Transit ferry runs from Leland to South Manitou daily and to North Manitou several days a week between June and early September, with passage available through Manitou Island Transit. Parking is at the public lot on River Street; the village itself is car-free. The dock and the dam can be reached from M-22, which runs through the centre of Leland.
