Introduction
In 1825 the first lighthouse was constructed in what would
become the state of Michigan. Built on Lake Huron, the Fort Gratiot
Light was named for a nearby military outpost, at the time one of the
few European settlements north of Detroit. Over the next 170 years the
nature of Great Lakes navigation, the kinds of ships on the lakes, the
cargoes being hauled over water, and virtually everything else about the
state would change in ways that would make the world of 1997
unrecognizable to George McDougall, Jr., the man who first lit the Fort
Gratiot light. McDougall would, however, recognize one thing, the lights
themselves; beacons in the night which from his day to ours aid sailors
throughout the Great Lakes.
Purpose and Administration
From the earliest days of the Republic, the federal
government has assumed responsibility for the construction, operation,
and maintenance of America's lighthouses and other aids to navigation.
Congress's intent has been to facilitate water-born commerce. Although
the military occasionally raised national security concerns in an effort
to assert greater control over navigational aids, Congress has
consistently placed the needs of commerce above possible military needs.
Throughout our nation's history lighthouses have been constructed and
maintained to serve the needs of commercial sailors.
From 1820 through 1852 responsibility for constructing and
operating lighthouses was vested in the Fifth Auditor of the United
State Treasury, who was given the title "General Superintendent of
Lights." Stephen Pleasonton, who held the Fifth Auditor position from
1820 through 1852 was responsible not only for lighthouses but also
audited the records of a half-dozen federal agencies.
His time divided between many, generally unrelated tasks,
Pleasanton proved not particularly insightful regarding the nation's
lighthouses, who tended to emphasize economy over any other
consideration. During his thirty-two years of responsibility for
America's lighthouses, the physical structures housing the lights
deteriorated while the lighting mechanisms themselves grew vastly
inferior to more advanced, and more expensive, lights used by other
nations.
Over the years criticism of Pleasanton's administration of
the lights grew and although Congress tinkered with the system at
several points, little changed. Finally, in March 1851 Congress directed
the Secretary of the Treasury to conduct a full-scale investigation of
the nation's lighthouses. In January 1852 Congress received a 760 page
report that, among other reforms, asked Congress to completely change
lighthouse administration. Although Pleasanton attempted to defend
himself, in October 1852 Congress enacted the reforms called for in the
report, including the creation within the Treasury Department of a new,
nine-member Lighthouse Board that took over administration of the
nation's lighthouses.
The Lighthouse Board quickly set about establishing much
needed new lights, updating the decaying physical structures that housed
existing lights, adopted newer and far more effective lighting
technology, and attempted to reform the system used to select keepers.
In the main the Lighthouse Board proved very successful. By the
beginning of the twentieth century America's lighthouses and other aids
to navigation were among the best in the world.
Despite this success, as the new century began various
critics of the Board began to call for a more streamlined agency run by a
single executive officer. As a result of these criticisms in June 1910
Congress officially abolished the Lighthouse Board and replaced it with a
Bureau of Lighthouses, commonly called the Lighthouse Service. The
Lighthouse Service was to be run by a single officer, who reported to
the Department of Commerce. George R. Putnam, a distinguished civil
engineer, was appointed to head the new Service. During his twenty-five
years in this post, Putnam the Service continued to expand and remained a
world-wide leader in technological innovation. In 1912 the Service also
introduced new accounting and inspection procedures that markedly
improved the effectiveness of the Service.
In 1939, in a governmental consolidation inspired by
President Franklin Roosevelt, the Bureau of Lighthouses became of a part
of the United States Coast Guard, which is, in turn, a part of the
Treasury Department. The Coast Guard, created in 1915, had long been
discussed as the "logical" home for the Lighthouse Service. Indeed, in
1912 President William Howard Taft had suggested to Congress that the
Life Saving, Lighthouse, and Revenue Cutter Services be merged to form
the Coast Guard. Although Congress, in 1915, merged only the Life Saving
and Revenue Cutter Services while allowing the Lighthouse Service to
remain independent, talk of uniting the Lighthouse Service with these
other two agencies persisted. By merging the Lighthouse Service with the
Coast Guard in 1939 Roosevelt essentially convinced Congress to
complete the 1912 recommendations of President Taft. The Coast Guard
continues to this day to be responsible for all navigational aids,
including lighthouses, on the Great Lakes and throughout the country.
Lighthouse Design and Construction
Between 1852 and 1860 twenty-six new lights were erected on
the Great Lakes. Although the Civil War and its aftermath greatly slowed
construction of new lights during the 1860s, a dozen new lights were
still lit. In 1870 the Board had again begun construction of new lights
in earnest. Between 1870 and 1880 forty-three new lights were lit on the
Lakes and in the next decade more than one hundred new lights appeared
on the Great Lakes. By the beginning of the twentieth century the
Lighthouse Board oversaw 334 major lights, 67 fog signals, and 563 buoys
on the Great Lakes.
During the nineteenth century the design of Great Lakes
lights slowly evolved. Until 1870 the most common design was to build a
keeper's dwelling and place the light either on the dwelling's roof or
on a relatively small square tower attached to the dwelling. In the
1870's, in order to raise lights to a higher focal plane, conical brick
towers, usually between eighty to one hundred feet in height, began to
be constructed. In the 1890s steel framed towers began to replace the
older generation of brick structures.
Between 1870 and 1910 engineers also began to face
challenges created by building lights on isolated islands, reefs, and
shoals that posed significant hazards to passing ships. These remote
lights often replaced lightships, which was the only practical way
originally available to the Lighthouse Board to warn sailors away from
dangerous underwater rock formations. Ships, however, proved difficult
to maintain. They could not be put in place until after the start of
navigation season and often had to be removed before the season's end.
Worse, regardless of the type of anchors used lightships could be blown
off their expected location in severe storms, making them a potential
liability in the worst weather when captains would depend on the charted
location of these lights to measure their own ship's distance from
dangerous rocks.
Usually built on underwater cribs, the first of these new
generation of remote lights was constructed at Waugoshance Shoal in
1851. A new level of expertise, however, was reached with the
construction of the Spectacle Shoal Light in 1874, the Stannard Rock
Light in 1882 and the Detroit River Entrance Light in 1885. The long and
expensive process of building lights in isolated or difficult locations
ended in nationally publicized engineering projects that constructed
the Rock of Ages (1908) and White Shoal Lights (1910).
Throughout the early years of the twentieth century the
Lighthouse Board and the new Lighthouse Service continued to build new
lights. In 1925, 433 major lights existed on the lakes, ten lightships
were still operational, 129 fog signals were maintained, as were about
1,000 buoys. Of these 1,771 navigational aids, in 1925 only about 160
stations had resident keepers. Even at this early date, the vast
majority of navigational aids had been automated. By 1925 virtually all
of the Great Lakes lighthouses that today exist had been constructed.
In 1925 ten lightships were stationed on the lakes, however twenty years later only one ship, the Huron, was still in service. The Huron
would remained stationed off Corsica Shoals in Lake Huron until 1970,
when this last active lightship on the lakes was decommissioned.
Automation also slowly changed the face of navigational aids. Throughout
the twentieth century both the Lighthouse Service and the Coast Guard
worked to eliminate the need for attended lights. In 1983 the last
attended light station in Michigan, Point Betsie on Lake Michigan, was
fully automated. Improved navigational aids, such as radio beacons, also
supplanted some lights and led to the ongoing abandonment of no longer
needed light stations. Although the number of navigational aids
continued to grow, in 1986 there were almost 2,500 aids maintained by
the Coast Guard, virtually all of the additions were buoys placed in the
water while many venerable lights which no longer served commercial
needs were extinguished.
The Lights
The keeper's residence, the tower, and all the other
buildings and structures that were constructed at a light station
existed to make visible and maintain one piece of equipment, the light
itself.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, under the
administration of James Pleasanton, Michigan's lighthouses generally
used a lighting system designed by Captain Winslow Lewis. The Lewis
apparatus used a lightly silvered parabolic shaped reflector to amplify
the light created by an Argand lamp that burned whale oil. In the field,
the reflector in the Lewis apparatus warped very quickly and the
lightly silvered surface was quickly abraded away by the tripoli powder,
an abrasive of the day commonly used to clean brass, that was used to
clean it. The result was that lights quickly grew dim and were of
minimal help to sailors.
A far superior apparatus was introduced by French physicist
Augustin Fresnel in 1822. The Fresnel lens used a series of glass prisms
that surrounded the light source in a lenticular (double convex)
configuration. Looking a bit like a beehive the result was a bright,
single beam of light that was far superior to anything else available in
its day. Fresnel lens were classified into six "orders" based on the
focal length of the lens, however seven sizes of light actually existed
because a "third and a half" order lens was made. The largest, a first
order lens, had a focal length of 36 inches, a lens diameter of six
feet, and stood nearly twelve feet tall. In contrast a sixth order lens
had a focal length of only 5.9 inches, a diameter of under one foot and
was about two feet in height. 
The French and English quickly adopted this new lens for
their lights and demonstrated the Fresnel lens superiority. Pleasanton,
however, who had become close friends with Lewis and relied on him for
technical advice, stubbornly refused to install the Fresnel lens in
American lighthouses despite its obvious superiority. In 1851 Pleasanton
oversaw over 300 lights nationwide of which only three had Fresnel
lens, each installed because of direct congressional action.
In 1852, with the establishment of the Lighthouse Board, the
Fresnel lens became the preferred lighting apparatus in American
lighthouses. By the late nineteenth century the Fresnel lens was in
service throughout the Great Lakes. No first order lens was ever
installed on the lakes, leaving the five second order lens placed on the
lakes the brightest to be lit. By the 1920's Fresnel lens began to
slowly give way to other forms of lighting apparatus, however as late as
1986 about one hundred Fresnel lens were still in use on the lakes.
A variety of different lights replaced the Fresnel lens.
Lenses similar to those used on train engines were often used as range
lights. Self-contained lens-lantern lights, that relied on electricity
for power, also were developed, and over time became the new standard
light for light houses and other illuminated navigational aids.
About the time that the Fresnel lens first began to appear
on the Great Lakes new lamps were also being placed in service to
replace the Argand lamp. Several lamps were used but all shared similar
designs, using from one to four concentric wicks, depending upon the
amount of light desired. Because of the near extinction of the sperm
whale, new fuels were also required. After extensive experimentation the
Lighthouse Board in the late 1850s decided to fuel its lights with
colza (rapeseed) oil. This decision, however quickly proved impractical
as the oil was manufactured from a plant rarely grown in the United
States.
In the 1860s preheated lard oil had become the most common
fuel used in lighthouses. Preheating, however, was difficult and
required keepers to somehow keep the oil warm as it was brought from a
stove to the light. The development of the incandescent oil vapor lamp
allowed the board in 1877 to adopt kerosene as the primary fuel for
lights, and by 1889 incandescent oil vapor lamps fueled by kerosene were
used in almost all the lights on the Great Lakes.
As early as 1886 the Lighthouse Board conducted experiments
using electricity. It would not be until the twentieth century, however,
when the electric power distribution grid became widespread and
reliable portable electric generators were readily available, that
electricity would become the common way to illuminate lighthouses. In
1925 sixty-eight major and forty-five minor Great Lakes lights, or about
one-quarter of the total in service, used electrical power. By the
early 1940s virtually all the lights on the lakes were powered by
electricity.
The use of electricity also greatly facilitated the
automation of the lights. As early as 1916 a device was introduced that
could automatically replace a burned-out incandescent light bulb.
Coupled with electrically run timers that turned the lights on and off,
it became increasingly possible to run lighthouses with only an
occasional visit for servicing and maintenance. Automation eventually
replaced keepers and in 1983 Michigan's last keeper-tended light was
automated. Today all the lights on the lakes are maintained through
occasional visits by Coast Guard maintenance crews.
Sources
Information found in this history is largely drawn from Charles K. Hyde,
The Northern Lights: Lighthouses of The Upper Great Lakes (Lansing: Two Peninsula Press, 1986).