The story
Port Ulao was a Lake Michigan wooding station, one of dozens of pier towns that sprang up in the 1840s to sell fuel to the wood-burning steamships working the lake. An Illinois investor named James Gifford — the founder of Elgin, Illinois — platted the town in 1847 on a bluff in Ozaukee County, built a thousand-foot pier out into the lake, and ran a long wooden chute down the bluff to load cordwood that local farmers cut as they cleared their land for fields. For a decade Ulao was the busiest shipping point in the county.
Its business had a short clock. As steamships converted from wood to coal through the 1850s, the market for cordwood collapsed, and when the railroad later ran its line inland past the bluff, the port lost its last reason to exist. The lake did the rest, eroding the shoreline and the pier over the following century.
Almost nothing is left. A few pier pilings still surface in the water off the old landing, and a roadhouse near the vanished village bears the name Ghost Town Tavern — about the only marker that Port Ulao was ever there.
What remains today
A few submerged pier pilings off the bluff, faint traces of the townsite, and the Ghost Town Tavern near the old Ulao rail station.
Questions from the field
- What was Port Ulao, Wisconsin?
- A Lake Michigan pier town founded in 1847 to sell cordwood to steamships. It faded once steamers switched to coal, and shoreline erosion erased most of it — only a few pilings and a namesake tavern remain.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Ulao — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Ulao's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1577866
- — Wikipedia — Ulao, Wisconsin
- — Ozaukee County Historical Society