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
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