Poe Reef Lighthouse

Poe Reef Light, photo by joeldinda

Terry Pepper has (as usual) a very detailed entry for Poe Reef Lighthouse on his Seeing the Light website. This crib style lighthouse is located off Bois Blanc Island in Lake Huron. The reef is very close to the surface and posed a significant threat to navigation until the decision was made in the 1890s to anchor a lightship there. This served until Lighthouse Service decided to build a permanent station on Poe Reef in 1927:

The station building at Poe Reef was to be an exact duplicate of that which the crew had previously completed at Martins Reef. The main twenty-five foot square structure consisted of a steel skeletal framework to which an exterior sheathing of riveted steel plates was applied. Thirty-eight feet tall, it contained three levels, or “decks”, as the crews assigned to the station knew them. The two upper decks were set up as living quarters, while the main lower deck served as housing for the machinery required for powering the lights, heating system and foghorn.

Centered atop the main structure stood sixteen-foot square, ten-foot high watch room of similar construction, with a single observation window on each side. Finally, a decagonal cast iron lantern room was installed on the roof of the watch room, and outfitted with a Third Order Fresnel lens. The combination of pier and tower provided the Fresnel with a seventy-one foot focal plane, and a visibility range of almost twenty nautical miles in clear conditions. Work was completed at the station and the light exhibited for the first time on the evening of August 15, 1929.

At some point in time, in order to eliminate the possibility of the Poe Reef Light being mistaken for the identical all white structure at Martin Reef, the main deck and watch room of the Poe structure were given a contrasting coat of black paint.

Terry has some cool shots of this light as well including this wide shot with cormorants.

Check Joel’s photo out background bigtacular and see more shots from Poe Reef and elsewhere in his Lighthouses slideshow.

More Michigan lighthouses on Michigan in Pictures.

Belle Isle Bolt!

Belle Isle View1D, photo by TroyMich (fferriolo)

BLAM!! Who’s ready for some spring storms? FYI, this is actually not a lighthouse off Belle Isle, it’s the Detroit Waterworks Intake Crib. You can have a look at on Google Maps.

Check this out big as the sky and in see more Frank’s slideshow.

More wicked weather on Michigan in Pictures!

Grand Marais, Michigan

Grand Marais Harbor Outer Light Station, photo by Gary of the North

The Michigan Historical Marker at Grand Marais reads:

Grand Marais, which is among Michigan’s oldest place names, received its name from French explorers, missionaries and traders who passed here in the 1600s. “Marais” in this case was a term used by the voyaguers to designate a harbor of refuge. In the 1800s Lewis Cass, Henry Schoolcraft and Douglass Houghton also found the sheltering harbor a welcome stopping place. Grand Marais’s permanent settlement dates from the 1860s with the establishment of fishing and lumbering. At the turn of the century Grand Marais was a boom town served by a railroad from the south. Its mills turned out millions of board feet annually. Lumbering declined around 1910, and Grand Marais became almost a ghost town, but the fishing industry continued. Many shipping disasters have occurred at or near the harbor of refuge, which has been served by the Coast Guard since 1899. In 1942 the first radar station in Michigan was built in Grand Marais. Fishing, lumbering and tourism now give Grand Marais its livelihood.

Check this out big as Lake Superior and see more in Gary’s slideshow.

More Grand Marais on Michigan in Pictures!

Holland Harbor’s Big Red Lighthouse and the Red Right Return

Big Red, photo by Rick Lanting

Sometimes I see photos of certain places so much that I figure I’ve said all there is to say about them. Such was the case with one of one of Michigan’s most iconic lighthouses. I realized that although I’d seen hundreds of photos, I had no idea how “Big Red” in Holland got its name. Terry Pepper’s Seeing the Light tells the story of the Holland Harbor Light from the construction of a timber frame beacon on the south pier in 1870 up until the 1930s when:

The Holland Lights were electrified in 1932. Equipped with a 5,000 candlepower incandescent electric bulb, the Fourth Order lens was now visible for a distance of 15 miles. The old steam-operated ten-inch fog whistle was removed from the fog signal building the following year, and replaced with an air operated whistle powered by an electric motor-driven compressor. In 1936, a square tower was erected at the west end of the fog signal building roof peak, and capped with an octagonal cast iron lantern, the lens from the pierhead beacon moved into the new lantern. The steel pierhead beacon was then removed from the pier and shipped to Calumet, where it was placed at the south end of the breakwater.

A Coast Guard crew arrived in Holland in 1956, and gave the combined fog signal building and lighthouse a fresh coat of bright red paint in order to conform to its “Red Right Return” standard, which called for all aids to navigation located on the right side of a harbor entrance to be red in coloration. Local residents thus began referring to the fifty year old structure as “Big Red,” a name which has stuck through the years. The Fourth Order lens was subsequently removed from the fog signal lantern in the late 1960’s, and replaced with a 250 mm Tidelands Signal acrylic optic.

Much more including photos at Seeing the Light.

Check this out Big Red big and see more in Rick’s Lighthouses or Hipstamatic slideshows.

Many more Michigan lighthouses on Michigan in Pictures!

Ice Kingdom

DSC08043RP, photo by Scott Glenn

Incredible what wind, water and way too cold can do! More about the St. Joseph lighthouse on Michigan in Pictures.

Check this out on black and see more icy goodness in Scott’s lighthouse slideshow.

Ludington Lighthouse, with chocolate and whipped cream

Lighthouse with chocolate and whipped cream, photo by Craig Sterken Photography

Craig shared this photo of the North Breakwater Pier and Lighthouse in Ludington on the Absolute Michigan Facebook the other day.

See it bigger on Facebook and see more on the Craig Sterken Photography Facebook page or at craigsterken.com!

More shots of  Ludington (and this lighthouse) on Michigan in Pictures.

McGulpin Point Lighthouse on the Straits of Mackinac

McGulpin Point lighthouse circa 1900, courtesy Emmet County Davenport collection/Terry Pepper

Terry Pepper’s Seeing the Light says that McGulpin Point Lighthouse entry tells the story of this point at the tip of Michigan’s mitten from circa 1000 BC when the great Odawa war chief Sagemaw more or less wiped out the Mus-co-desh tribe for an insult to the Odawa to when John McAlpine and his Native American wife settled on McGulpin Point in the 1760s. Their son Patrick McGulpin was given the patent on this land and the first recorded deed in Emmet County in 1811.

With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, Americans started to flood to the Chicago area. During the 1850s, vessel traffic through the Straits of Mackinac was increasing rapidly, and while the Waugoshance Light marked the western entry into the Straits, and the Bois Blanc Island light marked the eastern entry, the absence of a navigational aid within the shoal-ridden Straits themselves made passage during darkness and periods of low visibility extremely dangerous. To answer that need, the Lighthouse Board petitioned Congress for the construction of a lighthouse and fog bell at McGulpin Point, approximately two miles west of Fort Michilimackinac. Congress responded favorably to the request on August 3, 1854 with the appropriation of $6,000 for the station’s construction.

However, as a result of difficulties in obtaining clear title to the land, no action was taken on the station’s construction for more than a decade. With the original appropriation unspent and expired, the Board again petitioned Congress for the construction of a station at McGulpin Point in 1864, this time receiving $20,000 for the project on July 26, 1866.

Work began at McGulpin Point early in 1869, and the station was built as a mirror image of the design used at Chambers Island and Eagle Bluff lights under construction in the Door County area that same year. This plan, which is sometimes referred to as the “Norman Gothic” style, was also later also used at Eagle Harbor in 1871, White River in 1875, and at Passage and Sand Islands in 1882. (click for photos of these lights)

The keepers dwelling and integrated tower were constructed of Cream City brick with the tower integrated diagonally into the northwest corner of the dwelling. The first and second stories of the tower were approximately ten feet square with buttressed corners, while the tower’s upper portion consisted of a ten-foot octagon. Similar to other stations built on this plan, the tower is double-walled with a circular inner wall approximately four inches thick and eight feet in diameter to house a set of cast iron spiral stairs. The tower was capped with a prefabricated decagonal cast-iron lantern and outfitted with a fixed white Third-and-a-half Order Fresnel lens.

You can learn a lot more if you read on at Seeing the Light including the role the light played in knowing when the lakes would be opened for navigation, the role of Keeper Davenport and his 9 children in the rescue of the Waldo A. Avery, how the light was decommissioned in 1906 after the construction of Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse and passed into private hands and its return to the public domain.

Today McGulpin Point Lighthouse is an Emmet County park and open to the public. There’s many resources including the McGulpin Point brochure and some photos from a 2012 CMU archaeological dig.

You can see more photos by clicking through. Also check out the McGulpin Point slideshow from the Absolute Michigan pool on Flickr for some modern day photos!

Many more Michigan lighthouses on Michigan in Pictures.

Cheboygan Crib Light with Northern Lights

Cheboygan Crib Light, photo by yooper1949

Terry Pepper’s Seeing the Light says that the plan for the Cheboygan Crib Light that was drawn-up by the District Engineer called for a round crib with an octagonal cast iron pierhead beacon centered upon it.

Work began with the construction of a wooden crib onshore in Cheboygan, which was then lowered into the water and towed out to the specified location at the entrance to the dredged river channel. Sunk in place with the addition of crushed rock, an upper level consisting of oak timber framework was then constructed atop the crib, with a basement oil storage room beneath the location in which the tower was to be installed. The deck of this superstructure was then leveled at a height of eleven feet above the water, planked with timber and fitted with a circular oak ring centered over the oil storage room to serve as an anchoring foundation for the cast iron tower itself.

…One can only imagine the drudgery involved for the keepers who manned this station. Every afternoon he would have to leave the safety of the dwelling in Cheboygan and row the 1/4 mile out to the light in whatever weather the lake was dishing-up that day. On arrival at the crib, he would carefully secure his boat at the foot of the crib, and then gingerly step from the heaving boat onto the eleven foot ladder, climbing up to the deck while simultaneously carrying any supplies needed for the night. The lamp would illuminated at dusk, and the keeper would then sit in the solitude of the tower, huddled close to the stove to keep warm on cold nights during the late season, making frequent climbs to the lantern to adjust the light by trimming the wick, winding the occulting mechanism and adding fuel to the lamp. As dawn finally raised its head across the Straits of Mackinac, the lamp would be extinguished, and the illuminating apparatus, lens and lantern would be cleaned in preparation for illumination later that day. The keeper would then row the ¼ mile back to shore to get some sleep, knowing that he would have to back out on the crib to repeat the cycle a few short hours later.

Sounds like a wonderful job. Read lots more about the light from Terry Pepper.

If I were looking for northern lights, I might follow Carl around. He shot this on November 30th. See it background bigtacular and see more in Carl’s Northern Lights slideshow.

Want more lighthouses or northern lights? We have both on Michigan in Pictures…

The Ghost Keeper of Old Presque Isle Lighthouse

Old Presque Isle Lighthouse, photo courtesy Archives of Michigan

The Lightkeeper’s Ghost tells the tale of George and Loraine Parris who became the beloved caretakers of the Old Presque Isle Lighthouse, running the small museum and giving tours. George was something of a trickster and delighted in playing harmless tricks on visitors. He passed away in 1992, but the story doesn’t end there.

As Loraine was driving to the property on Grand Lake Road, which had a clear view of the lighthouse, she saw that it was illuminated.

She knew that the Coast Guard had rendered this impossible, but there it was before her. By the time that she arrived at the keeper’s house, though, everything was dark. The next day she climbed the steps of the lighthouse to make sure that everything was in order, and she saw that there was no way that someone could have turned the light on. Yet, this same pattern repeated itself again and again. Loraine never said anything about it because she thought that people might think her crazy.

Soon other folks began to see the light, however – a yellowish glow was reported from the lighthouse by several people. Some thought that the light had been put back into operation, but others drove out for a closer look, only to find that it was dark once again.

It was even spotted by members of the Air National Guard, who flew a few missions over the area, and by the Coast Guard, who investigated to make sure that no one could fire the light back up. It had been permanently disabled years before, so there was no way that the light could be shining. Yet it was. Many people believe that the spirit of playful old George is occasionally paying a visit to the lighthouse that he loved so much, just to let folks know that he’s doing just fine and to keep alive the stories of the lighthouse that he loved so much.

Read more about the history of the lighthouse from TexasEscapes.com and learn more about the light and visiting from the Presque Isle Township Museum Society.

This photo from Seeking Michigan and the Archives of Michigan was taken in 1963 at Old Presque Isle Light. See it bigger and check out more of their photos of the old and new lighthouses on Presque Isle.

More ghosts and ghost stories on Michigan in Pictures.

Hunter’s Moon, Harvest Moon, Blood Moon, October Moon

Big Sable Moon Rise, photo by Mi Bob

The Farmer’s Almanac says that October’s moon is the Full Hunter’s Moon or Full Harvest Moon:

This full Moon is often referred to as the Full Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon, or Sanguine Moon. Many moons ago, Native Americans named this bright moon for obvious reasons. The leaves are falling from trees, the deer are fattened, and it’s time to begin storing up meat for the long winter ahead. Because the fields were traditionally reaped in late September or early October, hunters could easily see fox and other animals that come out to glean from the fallen grains. Probably because of the threat of winter looming close, the Hunter’s Moon is generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both Western Europe and among many Native American tribes.

Bob took this last October at Big Sable Point Lighthouse. Check it out bigger and see more in his Sunset slideshow.

More on the moon and more of Big Sable Lighthouse on Michigan in Pictures.