Beaver Island Marine Museum

Structure

Built

1976-07-04

Coordinates

45.7479° N, 85.5089° WGoogle Maps: Beaver Island Marine MuseumDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

heritagemaritimefishingconstructioncommunity

Within

Beaver Island

Summary

The Beaver Island Marine Museum was reported open for public inspection on July 4, 1976, in a restored old harbor net shed identified as Shing Martin’s former net shed. The planned exhibits covered fishing, freight, and passenger boats and included photographs, documents, models, and nautical artifacts. It was one of five projects carried out by the island’s Bicentennial Committee, and it remains an active Beaver Island Historical Society museum, the subject of a 2023 deck-repair request for proposals and a 2026 accessibility project.

The 1975-76 restoration

A July 1976 Beaver Beacon account of the Bicentennial Committee’s five projects describes the Marine Museum, chaired by Robert Gillespie, as Project 2: restoring an old net shed on the harbor and stocking it with fishing, freight, and passenger-boat artifacts, photographs, sketches, models, and documents. It places the building “right on the Harbor, just west of the DNR Station,” identifies it as “the old Martin net shed, donated for this project by the kindness of George and Martha Miller and deeded to the Historical Society,” and calls it “one of the very last net sheds among dozens that once lined the Harbor.”¹

The same account describes the restoration work needed before the July 4 opening: the foundation had rotted badly and was largely replaced, one side of the shed was reshingled from ground to ridge with cedar shingles, the sagging roof was straightened and braced, and the building — which “had a bad list to the west” — was straightened, braced, and raised eighteen inches to clear the bank and the water. A new stairway and new center partitions were built on both floors for displaying photographs, and the surrounding bank was graded and riprapped. Ed Wojan was named as the contact for donations of nautical material, and the article reports that a donor named Fogg had already given a large photograph collection, with 150 to 300 images planned for reproduction; a rudder from the vessel Annabelle and nautical material from the Mormon Print Shop museum were listed among the planned exhibits.¹ A September 1976 Historical Society meeting report says further work on the Marine Museum was still required.²

A 2026 Northern Islander retrospective on the Bicentennial projects adds that Ed Wojan arranged the Millers’ donation and raised the funds for Wojan Construction Co. to rebuild the net shed “at cost,” after which Historical Society volunteers developed and installed the exhibits; it points to a project photograph of the crew on the shed’s south exterior wall on page 216 of the Society’s Journal of Beaver Island History, Volume 1.³

Builder and naming

Multiple held sources attribute the net shed’s construction to Shing Martin. A 2025 Northern Light remembrance of longtime museum volunteer Jude Martin describes him sharing “his family’s maritime heritage with visitors” and states that his grandfather, Shing Martin, built the net shed.⁴ Sources disagree on the year of construction: the 1978 Beaver Island Historical Map calls the building “originally Shing Martin’s net shed 1906,” while the 2026 Northern Islander retrospective describes it as “the last remaining 1902 net shed in St. James.” Neither date is independently confirmed in sources held here, and this article does not adopt one over the other.

Recent stewardship

The Historical Society solicited local-contractor bids to update the Marine Museum’s deck in a January 2023 notice.⁵ The 2026 retrospective describes a further preservation and accessibility project already underway: a new accessible ramp to replace the existing structure, and a custom-built cradle to protect and display the museum’s historic Miss Bay City trap-net vessel.³

Evidence and limits

The newspaper establishes a source-qualified structure and opening report. The current OSM label and Historical Society parcel closely agree, improving the present-day locator while leaving the historic net-shed footprint, accession register, formal charter, and continuous operating history unestablished. The 1978 Historical Map and the 2026 retrospective give different construction years (1906 and 1902 respectively); no independent source found in this audit confirms either year, so neither is adopted as the structure’s start_date.

Sources

See the sources block above.

Added 3 August 2026 · revised 7 August 2026. Recent changes