Navigational Aids and Tourist Attractions
The Great Lakes serve as a crucial mode of transportation for the people and resources of Michigan and the Midwest. While the Lakes carried shipments of lumber, iron ore, copper, and building materials throughout the 19th century, their cold and dangerous waters posed a threat to ships navigating them. In 1825, the first lighthouse was constructed on Lake Huron: Fort Gratiot Light, named after the nearby military post. Over the next 198 years, the nature of Great Lakes Navigation has changed with the introduction of GPS. It would be an unrecognizable world to those who first lit the lights.
In the early 1800s, Michigan began installing lighthouses to serve as beacons to guide sailors and prevent shipwrecks in the Great Lakes’ deadly waters. These lighthouses would shine onto the waters of the Lakes to warn sailors of shoals and shores, and many Michigan lighthouses still stand today, available to the public. Michigan built its first lighthouse 36 years after George Washington created the U.S. Lighthouse Service. In the decades that followed, lighthouses sprang up across the shores of Michigan, ranging from Detroit to Copper Harbor. The first lighthouses in Michigan kept their lights burning with whale oil; in the late 1800s, they used kerosene and acetylene. It wasn’t until 1900 that a Michigan lighthouse used electricity to power its guiding light for the first time (Penrose). Beginning with Fort Gratiot in 1825, Michigan went on to build the most lighthouses in U.S. history and employ the highest number of lightkeepers in the Lighthouse Service (Majher, Ladies of the Lights). Construction, operation, and maintenance of lighthouses in the 19th century was spearheaded by the U.S. government's desire to facilitate waterbourne commerce. The "General Superintendant of Lights" was also the Fifth Auditor of the United States Treasury, meaning that they were responsible for not only lighthouses but also a variety of other federal agencies.
Maintaining and running the lighthouses was tiring, isolating, and crucial work. While lighthouses were supplemented by rescue teams called the U.S. Life Saving Service, lighthouse keepers were almost solely responsible for the safe passage of ships throughout the Lakes. Lightkeepers were tasked with lighting their lamps at sunset and extinguishing them at sunrise; during shipping season, they not only managed the lights, but maintained the lighthouse itself, keeping it both functional professionally and livable as a home for themselves and their families.
One 19th-century outline of duties for lightkeepers stated that they must keep the lamps burning continuously from sunset to sunrise and trim the wicks of candles every four hours throughout the night in order to maintain the brightest lights. Inclement weather—a common feature on the Great Lakes—only intensified their work. In 1887, lightkeepers Catherine and Patrick McGuire kept the lights in their Marquette Harbor station burning for 697 continuous hours, a record. In addition to their challenging work, lighthouses were often remote, and lightkeepers lived there alone with their families.
Au Sable Point, for instance, sat 12 miles away from the closest village, connected only by a trail that became inaccessible on windy days due to high waves. A road between Au Sable Point and the nearest town wasn't built until 1928. During the shipping season, considered then to be between May and November, lightkeepers were instructed to "not absent yourself from the light-house at any time without first obtaining the consent of the Superintendent" (Majher, Ladies of the Lights). While later decades saw the invention of radios, sonar, and satellites to prevent shipwrecks, 19th-century Great Lakes lightkeepers relied primarily on their lamps and themselves night after night.
Men weren't the only ones to endure this grueling work; Michigan housed the most female lightkeepers in the entire United States. 52 women served as either principal or assistant lightkeepers in Michigan between 1849 and 1954, with the first one, Catherine Shook, serving at Pointe aux Barques on Lake Huron. While some of these women sought and obtained their positions on their own, many of them took up the mantle after the deaths of their husbands who served as lightkeepers. One such case was Elizabeth Van Riper Williams, the longest-running female lightkeeper, who served 41 years. She took up the profession after witnessing the drowning of her lightkeeper husband in 1872. She wrote about her experiences helming the lighthouse:
"Let our lamps be brightly burning
For our brothers out at sea—
Then their ships are soon returning,
Oh! How glad our hearts will be.
There are many that have left us,
Never more will they return;
Left our hearts with sorrows aching,
Still our lamps must brightly burn."
From the mid-1800s into the 20th century, technology gradually altered the landscape of lighthouse keeping. Electric lamps replaced kerosene; Fresnel lenses, glass prisms that intensified the beams of light, replaced metal reflectors. In the 1920s, lightkeepers began to lose their positions as more and more lighthouses became automated, using temperature-sensitive lamps that ignited themselves at night and turned off independently during the day. The first automated lighthouse was the Charity Island in Saginaw Bay, which was built in 1857 and automated in 1900 (Berger). Michigan lighthouses also began to use radio beacons during the 1920s. By 1942, there were 58 radio beacon stations on the Great Lakes; these stations could transmit a radio signal and blow a foghorn simultaneously, alerting passing ships more quickly and efficiently of impending danger. More and more, new innovations in lighthouse keeping drove lightkeepers out of the profession. The last Michigan lightkeeper, stationed in Point Betsie, retired in 1983.
While lightkeepers no longer manage the lighthouses of Michigan, many historical societies have stepped forward to maintain and preserve the state’s historic lighthouses, keeping many of them open and available to the public. The memory and significance of Michigan lighthouses lives on. In 1989, Governor James J. Blanchard declared August 7th as Lighthouse Day in Michigan, celebrating the 129 lighthouse structures still standing in the state.
Over fifty of these Great Lakes lighthouses are now home to museums, including the Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum and the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse Museum, the oldest lighthouse in Michigan. The Great Lakes region also contains more government-protected lighthouses than any other part of the country, with over fifty lighthouses residing on national and state parks, forests, and lakeshores.
To learn more about the history of lighthouses in Michigan, visit the Clarke Historical Library search engine and the state of Michigan’s lighthouse guide.
