Boat rides and lighthouses rank up there as a couple
of my favorite things, so a visit to the Copper Harbor Lighthouse at the far
reaches of northern Michigan’s remote Keweenaw Peninsula is a special treat for
me.
A short ferry ride via a Navy motorwhale takes
visitors out to the tip of the rugged Keweenaw Peninsula for tours of the
lighthouse from late May through mid-October. The tour boat is a tough boat
with a shallow draft and double-ended hull design that makes it especially maneuverable,
similar to launches early light keepers used to reach more remote lighthouses.
We’ve taken
this 15-minute ride out to the lighthouse several times over the years. The
boat’s captain gives visitors a short history of the lighthouse and the area,
plus the ride over and back offers some nice vantage points for photographs.
The Copper Harbor Lighthouse is one of the oldest
lights in Michigan, authorized by the government in 1847 after the 1844
shipwreck of the John Jacob Astor and the beginning of the Keweenaw copper
rush.
The John Jacob Astor was the first commercial vessel
to sail Lake Superior, bringing miners, missionaries and supplies to the area. It
wrecked along the lake shore after unloading supplies for troops at nearby Fort
Wilkins.
A 65-foot-tall tower served as the original Copper
Harbor light station, constructed in 1848-9 for $4,800. That original tower
soon fell into disrepair because of inferior construction.
The current sturdy brick light tower and attached
keepers’ house was built in 1866. The “schoolhouse” style of the structure is similar
in design to rural 19th century one-room schoolhouses with its
attached tower integrated into one of the end walls, much as a bell tower might
appear at the front of an old schoolhouse.
The small stone keepers’ house built in 1849 became
a place for oil storage, and that building still exists today just south of the
1866 structure.
An acetylene system replaced Copper Harbor’s Fresnel
lens in 1919, making a full-time keeper unnecessary at the station.
The Lighthouse Service leased the brick lighthouse dwelling
as a summer cottage in 1927. The Lighthouse Service found it difficult to
maintain the light and the renters’ privacy because the winding tower stairs
were the only access to the second floor and the light tower.
A 62-foot steel light tower next to the brick tower
and house appeared in 1933. The current electric light housed in that tower is
visible for up to 22 miles.
The Coast Guard became responsible for the country’s
lighthouses in 1939, and decided it didn’t want to continue rent the house at
Copper Harbor. The Coast Guard sold the Copper Harbor light station and its
buildings to the State of Michigan in 1957 for $5,000 (just a shade more than
the cost of just the original tower more than a hundred years earlier!).
The Copper Harbor Lighthouse complex became part of
Fort Wilkins State Park and opened as a museum in 1975.
Today, visitors to the Copper Harbor Lighthouse complex
enjoy a guided tour of the lighthouse restored to appear as it might have around
1900, exhibits about the lighthouse construction and mechanics in the original
1848 keepers’ home and time to hike the area on a short interpretive trail. You
can even see the mineral vein that led to the region’s big copper rush after Douglas
Houghton, Michigan’s first geologist, saw it and concluded that it would be
economically feasible to mine copper in the area.
Check out the Copper Harbor Lighthouse and more
great Great Lakes lighthouses in my story Five Midwest lighthouses to love
© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved
Comments