Leland & Fishtown — a stop on M-22 North.
Ahead is Leland, and down at the river you'll find Fishtown — a row of weathered gray fishing shanties on pilings over the water, and it is the real thing, not a reconstruction.
Commercial fishermen worked out of these shanties for well over a century, netting whitefish and lake trout out of Lake Michigan and shipping them south. Most of the Great Lakes fishing villages are long gone. This one survived essentially by accident and then by deliberate effort.
In February two thousand seven, a nonprofit — Fishtown Preservation Society — bought the whole works for about two point seven million dollars: eight shanties, two smokehouses, two hundred feet of docks, and both fishing tugs. Two more shanties were added later, and in January two thousand twenty-two the district went on the National Register.
The tugs still fish. The Janice Sue was built in Wisconsin in nineteen fifty-eight for gill-netting; the Joy was built right here in Leelanau County in nineteen eighty-one for trap-netting. They aren't exhibits — they go out and come back with fish.
Buy smoked whitefish from the shop on the dock and eat it sitting on the pier. That's the correct way to do Leland, and it hasn't changed in a hundred years.