Michigan Maritime Museum facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Michigan Maritime Museum

Entranceway to the museum in 2016
Location	260 Dyckman Avenue, South Haven, Michigan, United States 49090

The Michigan Maritime Museum is a cool place in South Haven, Michigan. It's a museum and a special library where you can learn all about ships and boats. You'll find it right by the Dyckman Avenue bascule bridge on the Black River. This river flows into Lake Michigan, which is one of the five huge Great Lakes.

This museum is all about Michigan's amazing history with boats and the Great Lakes. It shows how people have used boats for travel, trade, and fun over many years.

What You Can See and Do

The Michigan Maritime Museum has five buildings. These buildings are used to show off, explain, fix, and keep safe Michigan's boating history. It's a great place to explore and learn!

Sail on a Historic Ship!

One of the most exciting things you can do is take a ride on the Friends Good Will. This ship is a special kind of sailboat called a topsail sloop. It looks just like the ships used way back in the War of 1812! These ships were important for trading furs in North America. The Friends Good Will was rebuilt in 2004 to look exactly like the old ones.

If you become a museum member, you can even take a special training course to learn how to sail this ship. After you finish, you might get to join its crew and sail with them from May to September!

Meet Other Boats

Besides the Friends Good Will, the museum has four other boats that you can see.

• The Wilhelm Baum is a tugboat from 1923. It's been fixed up and looks great! It was given to the museum in 2016. You can see it outside.
• The Evelyn S. is another boat on display outside. It's a wooden fishing boat, about 50 feet (15 meters) long, built in 1939. It was used to catch fish with a special net called a gill net.
• Inside the museum, you'll find several smaller boats. They show different types of boats used in Michigan's waters.

See also

• List of maritime museums in the United States
• List of museum ships in the United States