Pull off Highway 42 at the top of the hill just south of Ellison Bay and you will see cars parked at odd angles, doors half open, someone always walking toward the rail with a phone raised. The view from Grand View Scenic Overlook takes in Washington Island, two county parks, and on a clear day the shoreline of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Most people who stop there assume the land has always belonged to the public, the way the water and the bluffs feel like they have always belonged to everyone who lives here.
They have not. A 44-unit condominium and residential project was once approved for that exact hillside, and four of the units were actually built before anyone managed to stop the rest.
The View Nobody Thought Could Change
The Hanson and Olson families had owned and cared for the hilltop since the 1900s, grazing horses and ponies on the slope in a way that, without anyone planning it, kept the sightline open. Generations of residents and visitors treated the pull-off as a given, the kind of place you slow down for without asking who owns it or whether that could change.
It changed when construction started. Terrie Cooper, a lifelong Door County resident who grew up in Ellison Bay, described the moment locals realized what was happening this way: "I grew up in Ellison Bay. This is my home." Nobody, she said, had ever imagined the view itself was something that could be lost.
By 2010, the Land Trust had entered into a purchase agreement with the property's owners and began the work of raising enough money to buy the parcel outright before more units went up.
What It Actually Took to Stop It
Saving a piece of shoreline hillside in Door County is not a handshake and a fundraiser bake sale. The Land Trust needed $1,133,000 to complete the purchase and cover short-term land management, and the money came from three distinct places, each with its own conditions and timeline.
| Funding Source | Amount |
|---|---|
| National Scenic Byways grant | $600,750 |
| Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund | $395,755 |
| Private donations | Nearly $250,000 |
| Total needed | $1,133,000 |
The Scenic Byways money came through because the stretch of Highway 42 and 57 north of Sturgeon Bay had been designated a Wisconsin Scenic Byway in April 2010, which made Grand View eligible as the byway's first funded project. The Knowles-Nelson award came from the state stewardship program that has since become a recurring flashpoint in Wisconsin's budget fights over conservation funding. The rest came from people who simply did not want to watch the hillside finish filling in.
The deal closed on March 7, 2012, after nearly three years of negotiation. The Land Trust established the 16-acre Grand View Scenic Overlook and Park and eventually transferred ownership to the Town of Liberty Grove, which now manages and maintains it with the Land Trust's continued support. The upper four acres became the mowed overlook drivers pull off to see. The lower twelve, marshy wetlands with two ponds along Hillside Drive, went through habitat restoration instead of becoming the site of new construction.
The Second Save Nobody Noticed
Here is the part that would slip past anyone who only knows the 2012 story. In 2000, a decade before any of that fundraising began, Don and Barbara Fuhrmann bought six acres at the bottom of the same hill for one reason: to keep it from being developed. They held onto it for close to 25 years while the parcel above them became a public park.
In 2024, the Fuhrmanns sold that six acres to the Door County Land Trust, adjacent to the park's existing boundary. They asked for exactly what they had paid in 2000, well below the land's current market value.
Don Fuhrmann has said the couple wanted to honor the original owner's wish to keep the land from being developed. As he put it:
"We bought it so no one else would build on it."
It is worth sitting with that line, because it describes a kind of quiet, unglamorous conservation that never makes it into a listing description: buying land specifically to do nothing with it, then giving up the appreciation on purpose.
The addition matters beyond sentiment. The Fuhrmann parcel sits closer to the water than the original park and includes wetlands, woodlands, and more of the Niagara Escarpment, the limestone ridge that forms the backbone of the Door Peninsula. It is also one more link in something the Land Trust and the Fuhrmann family have both said they want to see finished: a protected corridor running from Highway 42 down to Ellison Bluff County Park, the 174-acre bluff park about two miles southwest of the village, following the escarpment the whole way.
That corridor does not exist yet. It exists as six acres, sixteen acres, and a stated goal, which is how most land protection in Door County actually happens. Not as a single dramatic rescue, but as a series of individual owners deciding, one parcel at a time, not to cash out at full value.
Why the Story Still Matters If You Live Here
None of this shows up when you pull off the highway and take the photo. The overlook looks finished, permanent, the way parks are supposed to look once they exist. But the sequence behind it, approved development, partial construction, a scramble for grant money, a near-miss closing, and then a second landowner quietly extending the protection more than a decade later, is the actual mechanism by which this particular view survived.
It is a useful thing to know if you live in or near Ellison Bay, not because it changes anything about your daily route, but because it explains something about how this community has held onto its character. The Land Trust has worked with landowners across the county to protect more than 10,000 acres of fields, forests, farmland, and shoreline over its history, and the Grand View story is one of the clearer examples of what that work looks like up close: grants that require a private match, owners willing to sell for less than market rate, and a town willing to take on long-term maintenance of land it did not have to acquire in the first place.
The next time someone slows down at that pull-off and reaches for their phone, they are looking at a hillside that once had construction underway for a 44-unit condo project, with four of those units already built. It survived because a handful of people, some with grant paperwork and some with a personal stake going back 25 years, decided the hillside was worth more standing open than built out.
If you are curious about what else shapes daily life and property character in this stretch of the peninsula, from the escarpment corridor to the villages that sit along it, the Ellison Bay neighborhood page has more on the area. And if you ever want to talk through what a piece of Door County land, waterfront or otherwise, is actually worth holding onto, Whitney Lonzo is always glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.
