Manitowoc — 28 Submarines Built Inland, and a Coal-Fired Ferry Still Crossing the Lake

What Manitowoc Actually Is

Manitowoc is the seat of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, sitting where the Manitowoc River meets Lake Michigan roughly midway between Milwaukee and Green Bay -- and structurally, it's a materially different kind of market than the small resort villages further up the Door Peninsula (Fish Creek, Sturgeon Bay, Ephraim, Sister Bay) that this site also covers. Manitowoc built its identity on 19th- and 20th-century Great Lakes shipbuilding and manufacturing, not tourism, and it earned the nickname "Clipper City" from its 19th-century shipyards. That industrial base carried into the 20th century through companies including Mirro, a major aluminum cookware manufacturer historically headquartered in Manitowoc, and the Manitowoc Company, whose crane-manufacturing operations grew out of the same shipyard complex that built the WWII submarines described below. The practical result for a buyer is a housing market shaped by a genuine, diversified, year-round local economy and a real employed population, not a seasonal second-home market that depends on summer tourism -- a fundamentally different investment and lifestyle proposition than the smaller Door County towns to the north.

The single most distinctive fact about Manitowoc is its World War II submarine-building history, and it holds up under scrutiny rather than being local folklore. The Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company, working under U.S. Navy contract, built 28 Gato-class fleet submarines between 1942 and 1945 -- a genuinely unusual accomplishment for a Great Lakes shipyard with no direct route to open ocean. Because the Manitowoc River was too narrow for a conventional stern-first launch, completed submarines were launched sideways into the river, a distinctive method that drew national attention at the time. Getting the finished boats to salt water required lowering them onto a floating dry dock and towing that dry dock down the Illinois Waterway and the Mississippi River to New Orleans, since no route from Lake Michigan to the ocean existed that could accommodate a submarine hull under its own power. None of the original 28 Manitowoc-built submarines survives today -- several were lost in combat and the rest were scrapped or transferred after the war -- so the submarine now moored at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum on the Manitowoc River, USS Cobia, is a representative Gato-class boat rather than one of the original 28: it was built by the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, and brought to Manitowoc afterward specifically to stand in for the boats built locally, since none of those survived to be preserved. Cobia carries a genuine WWII combat record of its own and is designated a National Historic Landmark. That distinction -- a real, honored memorial vessel standing in for boats that no longer exist, rather than an original Manitowoc-built submarine -- is exactly the kind of detail this page states plainly instead of blurring.

The second landmark that keeps this history current rather than purely historical is the SS Badger, a coal-fired, steam-powered car ferry that still operates seasonally (roughly May through October, based on the route's long-standing operating pattern) across Lake Michigan between Manitowoc and Ludington, Michigan -- a roughly four-hour, 60-mile crossing operated by Lake Michigan Carferry. The Badger is widely described as the last coal-fired, steam-powered passenger vessel still operating in the United States, and it was built in 1952-53 at the Christy Corporation shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin -- tying it directly to the same Wisconsin Great Lakes shipbuilding tradition that produced Manitowoc's WWII submarines. The Badger's coal-ash discharge into Lake Michigan drew real regulatory scrutiny from the EPA in the 2010s; the vessel's operators committed to eliminating that discharge through an onboard ash-retention system rather than continuing to dump ash into the lake, and the ship was later designated a National Historic Landmark. That combination -- genuine current transportation utility, a real environmental compliance history, and formal historic-landmark status -- is a more complete and more honest picture than treating the Badger as either a pure nostalgia piece or ignoring its environmental history altogether.