Vermilion, Ohio: Harbor Town and Great Lakes Museum

Vermilion was incorporated as a village in eighteen thirty-seven and developed as a Lake Erie port town with shipbuilding and commercial fishing as core industries. The town's harbor drew sailors and captains whose Victorian-era houses now line the streets near the waterfront. In nineteen forty-four, the Great Lakes Historical Society was organized in Cleveland to collect and preserve written material and objects dealing with the history and folklore of the Great Lakes.

By nineteen fifty-three, the society's collection had moved to Vermilion, into a home donated by Commodore Albert Wakefield overlooking the lake. That collection became the Inland Seas Maritime Museum, which the society ran in Vermilion until it moved the museum to Toledo in two thousand fourteen, where it is now the National Museum of the Great Lakes. Congress built the first Vermilion Lighthouse in eighteen forty-seven to mark the harbor.