The Booth Cooperage

A local fishery once encompassed this entire block, where early sailing vessels brought their harvests to be salt packed in barrels and shipped to market. In The Cooperage, one of the remaining buildings of that fishery, 5 skilled coopers assembled barrels around a huge open hearth and turned out high-quality handmade barrels said to hold a 150 pound pack of salt fish. Today, power-driven fishing boats still land fish here in Bayfield, one of Wisconsin’s most famous fishing villages, and herring are still being salted annually as they were over 150 years ago.

Bayfield, Wisconsin · United States