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
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