The search for this parkland was competitive. In May 1908, members of the Wisconsin State Park Board toured Door County while town chairmen pitched their best tracts. Baileys Harbor and Jacksonport offered over a thousand acres spanning Kangaroo Lake and Lake Michigan. Sites near Clarks Lake, Ellison Bay, Gills Rock, and Europe Bay all had advocates. It was landscape architect John Nolen who recommended the Fish Creek site, and in 1909 the legislature agreed. Land acquisition began at that modest twenty dollars per acre, and the park was officially established in 1910 as Wisconsin's second state park. Early projects moved slowly on a shoestring budget -- miles of roads, scenic lookouts, campgrounds, two towers, and the beginnings of a golf course. By 1919, at the end of its first decade, twenty thousand visitors had come. The park was already becoming what its founders intended: a premier outdoor retreat for ordinary Midwesterners.

The Great Depression brought the Civilian Conservation Corps to Peninsula, and with it, a philosophical clash. CCC crews built roads and cleared dead wood, but the great Danish-American landscape architect Jens Jensen objected. A park, Jensen argued, should be a place different from the man-made world where one may find and enjoy and study the work of the Great Master. His vision of wild preservation collided with the practical needs of a public park, a tension that continues in park management to this day. A stranger chapter arrived in the summer of 1945, when Fish Creek became the site of a German prisoner-of-war camp, affiliated with the base camp at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. The prisoners cut wood, worked construction projects, and picked cherries in the park and surrounding orchards -- a surreal intersection of world war and Door County agriculture that few visitors today would guess at while biking the Sunset Trail.

The park's 150-foot limestone bluffs are its most dramatic feature, and the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse has stood watch over them since 1868. Construction was authorized by President Andrew Johnson in 1866, and the lighthouse was built at a cost of twelve thousand dollars. Automated in 1926, its keeper's quarters became a museum in 1963. Above the bluffs, Eagle Tower has offered panoramic views of the park, surrounding islands, and the Michigan shoreline since the original structure was erected in 1914. The tower built in 1932 to replace it served until 2015, when disrepair forced its closure. A new tower now stands on Eagle Bluff, somewhat shorter than its predecessor but featuring an accessible ramp from the bluff. From its heights, the geography of Door County unfolds -- the green canopy of the park, the blue expanse of Green Bay, the scattered islands, and the distant Michigan shore.

Most visitors know Peninsula for its 468 campsites, its 18-hole golf course -- one of Wisconsin's most scenic, with a signature 65-yard par three that sends golfers over a bluff -- and its sandy beach at Nicolet Bay. But the park holds quieter treasures. Horseshoe Island, accessible only by private boat, is the only nearby island owned by the state. Its only facilities are a pit toilet and a hiking trail threading past the foundations of buildings once occupied by the Folda family in the 1890s. French explorer Jean Nicolet reportedly landed there centuries earlier. Weborg Marsh, a ten-acre spring-fed wetland along Shore Road, rises and falls with the seiche of Green Bay. And at Welcker's Point, the northernmost campground, visitors gather at a shelter each summer evening to watch bats emerge thirty minutes after sunset, wheeling into the darkening sky above the forest canopy.

Perhaps the most unexpected feature of a state park is a professional theater. Northern Sky Theater, formerly American Folklore Theatre, has performed original musical comedies on the park's 700-seat outdoor stage since 1970. Over fifty thousand people attend each summer season, sitting on wooden benches beneath the cedars while actors sing about ice fishing, Belgian immigrants, and Green Bay Packers fans from outer space. The golf course that began as six holes with sand-and-oil greens in 1921 now stretches to eighteen holes measuring over five thousand yards. The Sunset Bike Trail winds through hardwoods and marshes on a route that takes about an hour to ride. Peninsula State Park is, as Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources has called it, the state's most complete park -- a place where lighthouse, theater, golf course, campground, wetland, and island all exist within the same stretch of shoreline, each layer added across more than a century of public stewardship.