The Sandy Bay Pier site is significant as a surviving and early example of a resource crucial to Euro-American transformation of Kewaunee County and the midwestern United States. The Sandy Bay Pier represents the rural coastal heritage of Kewaunee County and the infrastructure that facilitated the creation of the county’s agrarian economy during the Colonization era. The pier served as a point of disembarkation, embarkation, export, import, and resupply serving area residents and owners of the adjacent Sandy Bay sawmill and commercial complex in the years immediately prior to and the decades after the 1854 Treaty of the Wolf River, when the forests of the northwestern Lake Michigan coast were opened for exploitation and Euro-American colonization.

The pier represents a nexus where the lumber trade and immigration interfaced to permanently alter Kewaunee County’s landscape and economic system. Archaeological deposits around the pier have the potential to supplement historic records regarding the often-unnoted people who worked on the pier, trod its decks, and frequented the waters around it.