School’s Out For Summer

This could be you.

Location, location, location! When Washington Islanders decided they needed a school, they built on the shore of one of Door County’s finest beaches. The year was 1850, and while other Wisconsin children gazed out their schoolhouse windows to see fields of corn, cows out to pasture, or a dirt road – the students of Washington Island saw brilliant blue water stretching out from a beach of stony pebbles.

Fast-forward a century. A larger school was built for all the island’s students –with a less distracting view. Now the stony beach is open to the public, offering a beautiful nook of the island for swimming, sunning, barbequing, and boating. (And they have flush toilets!) The beach is aptly named Schoolhouse Beach – though we’re not sure how much learning goes on there. On many days adolescents on summer break swarm to the orange raft anchored in the water, laughing and flirting, jumping in the cool water. Oh, to be young again…

With some maneuvering, the smooth stones provide surprisingly cozy seats for those of us looking to relax with a book, or just our thoughts: ‘God, this is amazing!’

The stones also offer hours of entertainment – stack ‘em as high as you can. Compete with a friend, or stranger – whoever stacks the highest wins!

And though the stones may be lovely souvenirs of your fabulous trip to Washington Island – which you will put on a shelf and never think twice about – leave them be. Rocks don’t reproduce and nature spent a couple centuries creating Schoolhouse Beach’s stony shore. Though the stones appear to extend for miles and miles, the beach is actually a sandy basin. So don’t take the rocks. Can’t resist? That’s $250 dollars, thank you very much. Any student – on break or not – will tell you that’s a lot of money.