Robert Manning always wished that his hometown of Empire, Michigan, had a lighthouse to help guide him safely to shore after his many evening fishing trips, and his friends and family finally made his wish come true with the lighting of the Robert H. Manning Memorial Light at Empire’s Lake Michigan Beach Park in 1990.
I wondered about the little light tower when I first saw it at the park. The 35-foot-tall tower is smaller than a conventional light tower, but it is has a fully functional light beacon. The Coast Guard even included the light on their Great Lakes navigational charts.
Manning, a life-long Empire resident, died at the age of 62 in 1989. His often expressed wish for a lighthouse was sort of joke among Manning and his family and friends, but his family and friends made sure his memory and love of Great Lakes fishing lived on by raising the money to build one of just three memorial lighthouses in Michigan (the state’s other two memorial lighthouses are both in Detroit-the William Livingstone Memorial Light on Belle Isle and the small memorial lighthouse at the Tricentennial State Park on the Detroit River).
The white stucco-clad wooden Manning Memorial tower is capped by a green lantern room and railing. The structure’s design includes decorative features like grey-stained windows and a gold ball topping the peak of the light tower’s roof. The tower’s design also bears a passing resemblance to the nearby Point Betsie Lighthouse.
There is a smaller replica of the Manning Memorial Lighthouse at Lake Havasu in Arizona. That 20-foot-tall tower is part of a collection of more than 15 small scale replicas that allow the Arizona community to lay claim to having more lighthouses than any other city in America. Lake Havasu, incidentally, is also home to a recreation of an 1831-vintage London Bridge that spanned the River Thames until 1967, when Lake Havasu officials brought the original bridge’s dismantled pieces to America and reconstructed it.
The view from the Manning Memorial Light would be far more difficult to replicate, though. The light tower’s location on Lake Michigan, along the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, overlooks scenic dunes, bluffs, and white sand beach.
The Village of Empire owns the Manning light, and the light’s location in the village park is just two blocks north of the junction of Michigan highways 22 and 72 in Empire.
Check out earlier Midwest Guest stories about Empire, Michigan, including Empire, a quintessential and quirky small northern Michigan town
Curious about Arizona’s Lake Havasu? Check out Lake Havasu City: Images of America by Frederic B. Wildfang
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
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