Joe Norton’s family has been building boats since the late 1800s. Norton himself was building boats professionally by the time he was 13 years old.
“I grew up around these boats right from the beginning,” says the lifelong Green Lake resident. “I was doomed.”
Norton Boat Works was founded in 1970 in Green Lake as a boat design, building and restoration business. While today the business primarily focuses on restoration work, Norton has built and restored hundreds of world‑championship wooden boats and ice boats over his career.
One of Norton’s earliest ice boats, a sailing vessel with metal runners for gliding across a frozen lake, was featured in a 1965 edition of Sports Illustrated when he was just 16 years old.
“I’ve built hundreds of ice boats that are literally all over the world and still winning some of the regattas,” Norton says.
Norton’s favorite original design is his All Weather Inboard Picnic Launch, a spin on the classic motor launches that provided lake tours during the 1920s. Built of Douglas Fir, the boat’s interior can be customized to fit up to 30 passengers.
Twelve years ago, Norton sold the business to former customer Jeff Simon, but Norton can still be found in the shop most days, working alongside the shop’s three staff members and mentoring student apprentices.
Annually, Norton Boat Works meticulously restores six to eight vessels by hand. The average restoration takes about four months to complete, Norton says. The team is world-renowned for installing West System boat bottoms, a technique Norton helped pioneer in the 1970s.
As woodworkers, Norton says the team gets involved in “little secret projects” beyond boatbuilding, such as building restaurant furniture and custom signs. But wooden boats, which have become synonymous with Green Lake and the good life, will always have Norton’s heart.
“When you drive up to any of the restaurants in a wooden boat, there’s three or four people helping you dock right away,” he says. “You can buy a fiberglass boat — they have all the glitz and everything else, but they’re not a wooden boat.”
