Two Rivers

Two Rivers sits where the East and West Twin Rivers meet Lake Michigan, a working harbor town that spent its first century on commercial fishing and shipbuilding before quietly picking up an unlikely second claim to fame: the invention of the ice cream sundae. Local legend, backed by enough old newspaper accounts that historians take it seriously, credits a soda fountain owner named Ed Berners with topping a dish of ice cream with chocolate syrup in 1881 at a customer’s request — syrup was normally reserved for sodas — and the “Sunday treat” spread from there.

Washington House and the original sundae

We tracked down Washington House, a restored 1850s building that now includes a re-created ice cream parlor telling the sundae origin story in detail, and ordered the “original” recipe: vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and a single maraschino cherry, no fudge, no nuts, nothing modern about it. It was almost startlingly plain compared to the sundaes we knew, and that plainness felt like the point — a taste of exactly what a nineteenth-century soda jerk would have improvised on the spot.

Rogers Street Fishing Village

Down at the harbor, Rogers Street Fishing Village preserves a cluster of nineteenth-century fishing shanties and a decommissioned lighthouse, tracing the town’s commercial chub and whitefish fishing industry, which once supported dozens of family boats working these waters before overfishing and invasive species collapsed the trade in the mid-twentieth century. We walked the docks at sunset as a handful of remaining charter boats came in, gulls trailing behind them, the lake gone pink and completely calm.

Getting There

Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport (GRB) is the closest with commercial service, about 45 minutes north. Milwaukee Mitchell International (MKE) is roughly an hour and a half south. A car is necessary for reaching both the harbor village and nearby Point Beach State Forest.