Summer sees a steady stream of fishing boats and pleasure
craft parade past the Manistee North Pierhead Lighthouse and into the mouth of
the Manistee River. Fishers settle in for the day along the pier or on the
rocky breakwater by the small companion light just south of the pier as gulls
swoop lazily overhead.
Winter brings a much quieter scene, and looking over my
winter photos from Manistee makes me wonder what is happening with the city's proposed
acquisition of the lighthouse.
The most recent article found about the lighthouse's fate
was a November 18, 2009 story from the Ludington Daily News. At that time, the
Manistee City Council agreed to seek ownership of the lighthouse and a working
relationship with the Manistee Historical Museum with an eye toward possibly
opening the lighthouse for public tours in the future.
The Manistee North Pierhead Lighthouse, like many Great
Lakes lights, recently became available at no cost to other government
agencies, non-profit corporations, educational agencies, or community development
groups will to preserve and maintain the lighthouses for educational,
recreational, cultural, or historic preservation programs.
Such transfers usually take a while, as anything involving
one or more government entities and acquiring groups that often struggle to
meet eligibility requirements or raise sufficient money to preserve, restore,
and maintain the historic light towers.
Hopefully, the process is quietly moving forward behind the
scenes, and new ownership will become a new chapter in this beautiful
lighthouse's long history at Manistee.
Manistee, like many towns in Michigan's northern lower
peninsula, grew around lumbering. The Manistee River offered a prime location
near the forest with easy access to Lake Michigan, and the first lighthouse appeared
at Manistee in 1870.
Many students of regional history remember 1871 as the year
of a devastating fire that decimated Chicago. The Chicago fire killed at least
300, destroyed $200 million worth of property and left 100,000 people homeless.
Those numbers made it one of the most spectacular disasters of the nineteenth
century and sparked rumors that a cow owned by Mrs. O'Leary caused the fire by
knocking over a lantern.
The Chicago fire and Mrs. O'Leary's cow became immortalized
in song, parades, stories, and plays, but many seemed to forget that drought,
high temperatures, and storms also caused several other fires in northeastern
Wisconsin and northern Michigan, including Manistee, the same day-October 8,
1871.
The Manistee lighthouse, a wooden structure like most other
buildings in town at the time, burned down to the foundation. Fire raged through
Manistee, destroying $1,000,000 in property, burning many area forests, and leaving
many people homeless, although there were no deaths.
Manistee began the process of rebuilding itself, erecting new
structures in brick, rather than wood. Many of the city's lovely Victorian
homes and other buildings date from the late 1800s, and Manistee became known as Lake Michigan's
Victorian Port City.
Congress allocated money to rebuild the lighthouse at
Manistee, constructing a two-story house with a light tower, nearly identical
to the original structure, in 1872.
Manistee seemed to recover from the fire in relatively short
order, as steadily increasing commerce in the port city led to multiple
improvements and changes for the lighthouse, the piers, and the harbor in
general.
By 1875, a new south pierhead light replaced the original
lighthouse as a beacon, although keepers still lived in the original house and
rowed out to the light to maintain it several times a day.
By 1879, an elevated walkway between the shore and the light
tower offered lightkeepers a safer way to access the light to maintain it.
The remaining years of the nineteenth century saw many
changes in the configuration of lights and fog signals at Manistee. The north
pier became home to the main light by the 1890s, and the elevated catwalk also
moved from the south pier to the north pier.
The Army Corps of Engineers constructed a breakwater on the
south side of the harbor in 1914, creating a large stilling basin with the
north pier in the harbor to help assure calmer water at the channel entrance.
Major improvements at Manistee in 1927 resulted in a
configuration of lights familiar to today's visitors, featuring a 39-foot-tall
iron tower at the end of the pier with an iron catwalk leading out to the
lighthouse to replace an old wooden walkway.
I'll be watching to see if the proposed lighthouse
acquisition by the city goes through in Manistee, and hopefully look forward to
spending more lazy days strolling along the pier, watching the pier fishers
pull in their catches, and checking out the passing nautical parade.
Does anyone know more about the proposed lighthouse
acquisition?
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
