The Port of Green Bay: Lumber, Flour, and a Seaway to the World
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
American soldiers arrived at Green Bay by sailing ship in eighteen sixteen to build Fort Howard. Within two decades, the port was one of the most active on the upper Great Lakes. By the eighteen sixties, Green Bay was exporting lumber, barrels, shingles, and railroad ties down Lake Michigan, feeding the construction of Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of growing cities.
Within a generation the timber was gone from the surrounding forests, and the port shifted to grain. Flour became a major export, a fact that surprises people who associate the city almost entirely with football. When the St.
Lawrence Seaway opened in nineteen fifty-nine, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, Green Bay became an international port almost overnight. Bulk freighters from Europe could now reach the city directly. The Brown County Harbor Commission, established in nineteen twenty-eight in anticipation of this moment, had spent three decades preparing the infrastructure.
What had been a regional port became a link in global trade routes. Today the port handles dry bulk, coal, limestone, salt, along with liquid asphalt, wood pulp, and oversized cargo: machinery, wind turbine components, industrial equipment too large to move by road. The same waterfront that once loaded birch and white pine now loads the components of wind farms.
The cargo has changed five times over. The geographic fact that made the port indispensable has not changed once.
