Lighthouses of Western Lake Superior

This story is part of our series on Lake Superior lighthouses.

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“April 23 – Digging up suer to let water out of 1 assts basement which was flooded with nearly two foot of water, weather cold with snow squals north west wind.”

Daily life, apparently, was not a nonstop adventure for lightkeepers, especially on Lake Superior’s western shores and as witnessed in this 1928 log entry from F.J. Covell, head keeper at Split Rock Lighthouse. The lake’s western lighthouses seem to have fewer heroic tales than those found on the Shipwreck Coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or in Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands, but when the winds and waves roared or the fog rolled in, these lightkeepers scrambled just as diligently to keep their beacons burning and horns sounding.

“In some ways it was probably more exciting here (in the past),” says Lee Radzak, historic site manager at Split Rock Lighthouse. “The ships were smaller, so there were more of them.” Radzak says keepers in the early 1900s describe looking onto the waters of Lake Superior and seeing 20 to 30 ships at one time.

Whether installed to protect ships from breakwaters and shoals or to direct vessel traffic to safe channels, Lee says, “the western lighthouses were put where they were for a reason; all of the locations were important. They pretty much had to be there.”

The first Lake Superior lighthouses went into service at Whitefish Point and Copper Harbor, Michigan, in 1849, but it took seven more years before a brick lighthouse with a 50-foot cylindrical tower was built on the lake’s western shores. The Minnesota Point Lighthouse site was surveyed in 1855, the year that the Soo Lock opened, and the light was completed in 1858, the year Minnesota became a state. R.H. Barrett was the first keeper of the light featuring a red Fifth Order Paris-built Fresnel lens. (Fresnel lenses rated from First Order, the most powerful, down to Sixth Order.)

At the Minnesota Point light, story has it that Barrett had to blow, literally, a horn during fog, much to his wife’s distraction, says Lee Radzak. Barrett resigned to pursue business and other interests after two years with the lighthouse and became an important figure in the booming city of Duluth.

The light on Minnesota Point proudly marked the entry for seafarers into the bustling Superior-Duluth harbor until 1885, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a new pierhead light on the north breakwall (Superior Entry North Breakwater Lighthouse). This new lighthouse made the Minnesota Point light unnecessary, and it was extinguished and the lens removed.

The keeper’s building at Minnesota Point was renovated, likely with a fair amount of work as implied from this 1868 report of the lighthouse inspector that the 10-year-old dwelling “leaks badly around the chimneys. The rain and soot have discolored the walls. The plastering has fallen in many places and is loose in nearly all the rooms.” Later other quarters would be built for assistant keepers.

A barren remnant of the brick Minnesota Point tower stands as the oldest existing structure in Duluth. Not an easy visit, the tower is accessed from Duluth’s Canal Park by crossing the Aerial Lift Bridge, traveling to the end of Minnesota Avenue and then hiking 1-1/2 miles from marked parking near Sky Harbor Airport. Although only the moldering shell remains, that it still stands inspires reverence in lighthouse lovers for its durability and importance to Lake Superior mariners.

The Wisconsin Point Lighthouse (also called the Superior Entry South Breakwater Light) actually started life as the lighthouse built on the Minnesota side of the entry in 1885 to supercede the Minnesota Point Light. The structure was transferred across the channel into Wisconsin in 1892. A steam fog signal building was also built behind the newly positioned light.

Neither the light nor the fog signal building would stand for long, says Thomas Holden, director of the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center in Duluth.

It was November 27, 1905, and the Twin Ports were being pummeled by a now-legendary storm, the worst the Great Lakes had ever endured. Sixty-mile-an-hour winds, snow, sleet and rain turned the lake into a navigator’s nightmare, downing 29 ships and taking 200 lives before it was spent. Now called the “Mataafa Blow,” the storm took its name from the SS Mataafa, a vessel that was smashed broadside into the Duluth pier, wrecking the ship and causing the death of nine crewmen as thousands of horrified Duluthians looked on, incapable of doing anything to save them. But the Mataafa wasn’t the only victim in the ports that night.

Thomas Doody was at his post as keeper of the Wisconsin Point Lighthouse, which in those days sat atop a timber frame accessed by an elevated wooden walkway down the pier. Doody stuck to his post until the lighthouse itself began to shake and rattle with the force of the storm. He had to get away, but the only path back to shore was via the elevated trestle. Struggling to the mainland through the blinding sleet and rain, he kept his footing with waves pounding around him. Once safely on solid ground, Doody heard the light give a single long, loud whistle and then, nothing. When the storm subsided, he saw that the lighthouse itself had been swept away, along with 250 feet of the elevated walkway on which he had made his hasty departure. Nearly all of the light’s fog signal building was gone, too and, incredibly, 40 tons of coal.

“There’s a mystery about what happened to the light’s lens after that storm,” says Thom. “I think it’s still in the water.”

The Mataafa storm would be the catalyst for building two more western lighthouses – one on Duluth’s north pier and the other at Split Rock. Reconstruction began immediately on the drowned Wisconsin Point Light, but it wasn’t fully operational for five months. Keeper Doody and his wife, Annie, stayed on. It’s worth noting that Annie was listed as “acting assistant keeper” from August 18 through 24, 1906, and again from April 6 to August 14, 1907. Keepers’ wives, who often served as unofficial assistants, were rarely recorded as such officially.

In 1912, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a new lighthouse and fog signal at Wisconsin Point atop a concrete foundation – one that furious waves couldn’t destroy – rising 11 feet on the south breakwater. Completed and lit in 1913, the beacon’s Fourth Order Fresnel Lens flashed its green 5-second signal at 5-second intervals 22 miles across the water. (Lighthouse signals are like fingerprints that identify them.) Although automated with a rotating aero beacon in 1970, that signal has guided ships to the entry through the intervening century to the present.

An active aid to navigation, the building is not open to the public and is difficult, though not impossible, to reach over the random rubble at the landward end.

To visit the light, take Moccasin Mike Road off Highway 2 in east Superior either to a parking lot near the Superior Entry, or slightly closer to town from there, take a left on a dirt road to a lot near the breakwall. Both locations make for good photos of the lighthouse.

In Duluth’s Canal Park, two lighthouses have become well-known landmarks. The lights, on parallel piers, jut into Lake Superior just out from the famed Aerial Lift Bridge. Among the most visited lights on the lake, these twins remain active aids to navigation and are not internally open to the public. Visitors can walk to the lights on the piers.

The first navigational light marking the Duluth Ship Canal (on the south pier) went into operation in 1874, shortly after the canal became functional. Its first lightkeeper was Ernest Jefferson, who served 15 years. A raised walkway provided some safety for keepers when waves crashed over the breakwall. The lightkeeper’s quarters was a single dwelling at the inner end of the breakwall on Minnesota Point. The assistant keepers had to find housing in town until 1912, when a large duplex was built across Minnesota Avenue from the keeper’s quarters. Today mariners can align the south lighthouse with a range light on shore to steer into the proper entry channel.

Earlier, in 1901, after the Army Corps of Engineers completed a $7 million project to widen the canal to 300 feet and to reinforce the breakwalls with concrete piers, the current South Pier Light and fog signal were constructed. The tower rises 44 feet out of the lakeward end of the single-story fog signal building, giving the fixed red Fourth Order Fresnel Lens a 12-mile range in clear weather. It would be the only beacon marking the entry until the Mataafa storm brought to light the need for another beacon on the canal.

Navigators had long complained that the narrow canal, difficult to locate even in fair weather, needed a second beacon, and the Lake Carriers Association made numerous requests for a light marking the north breakwall. The association itself installed a temporary light on the north pier in 1908.

The U.S. Lighthouse Board apparently got the message and hastily pushed to build a second tower. Congress appropriated funds in early 1909 and work began by fall. By April 7, 1910, the 36-foot iron tower and the North Pier Light went into operation and its Fifth Order Fresnel lens has faithfully sent its 2-second flash every 2 seconds for 94 years.

For the lightkeepers on both piers, simply getting to work could be a life-or-death adventure during stormy, windy conditions. Keeper John N. Hanson, who tended the south light in the 1940s, told of creeping toward the light on the pier’s narrow, raised walls during storms because the crashing waves flooded the walkway itself. He was never swept into the lake by the waves, but a visiting Coast Guardsman wasn’t as lucky. Hanson recalled watching the man dive from the pier’s wall into the water-filled walkway during a storm to avoid being swept away by a towering swell. The lake had other plans. The wave caught him, carrying him off the south pier and into the canal nearly to the lift bridge, then miraculously depositing him back on the north pier’s walkway, not much the worse for wear.

Tunnels under both piers were built in the early 1900s to avoid such deadly situations. They even included rail cars to ferry the keepers to the lights and back. But poor construction thwarted a good idea, however, because the tunnels routinely filled with water, forcing keepers onto the exposed piers. By the 1960s, the entrances to the tunnels were sealed with concrete, but, as Thom says, their “ghosts” still exist under the piers.

While folks lobbied for lighthouses, fog signals in Duluth have apparently always been a bone of contention for residents. In 1895 during the foggiest conditions ever recorded at the Twin Ports, keepers shoveled 45 tons of coal into steam-powered foghorns that blew nearly continuously for 1,048 hours, reports lighthouse afficionado Terry Pepper on his website.

Outraged citizens demanded action to relieve their frayed nerves and frazzled eardrums. The Lighthouse Service took steps that reduced the noise, but each improvement aroused further complaints. Still later, in 1923, electrically powered foghorn “diaphones” caused additional anger, and residents wrote letters to the local newspaper, to the Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Bureau of Lighthouses, and even to Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce at the time. In all cases, sound “blinders” directing the sound away from downtown toward the lake seemed to help.

Ironically, some 100 years after installation of the first foghorn at the Duluth piers, the noise created by the refurbished diaphone foghorn reinstalled in 1995 on the south pier has again caused concern. Today, the distinct BEE-Oh tone of the compressed air horn installed by TOOT – “reTurn Our Old Tone” – operates only during daylight foggy conditions, replaced at night by a “peanut whistle,” an electronic signal more commonly used these days by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Twenty miles east of Duluth, the Two Harbors Lighthouse is the oldest western Lake Superior lighthouse still in operation.

Need for the light followed shipment of Minnesota’s first iron ore from Two Harbors in 1884, when Agate Bay quickly became an important shipping center. In 1887, the Corps of Engineers planned to increase the harbor’s natural protection with breakwaters at the eastern and western approaches and realized the need for navigational aids to help ships avoid those walls.

Built in 1891 and lit in 1892 by head keeper Charles Lederle, the Two Harbors Lighthouse had a Fourth Order Fresnel Lens. The lens operated like a grandfather clock with weights and chains that needed winding to rotate – a constant task for keepers. Like many keepers on western Lake Superior, Lederle had a long Lighthouse Service career, continuing in Two Harbors for 18 years before transferring to Duluth in 1910 for five years with the lights there.

From its birth, the Two Harbors Lighthouse oversaw heavy vessel traffic with more than 1,300 ships visiting its port that first year.

The red brick, two-story structure housing the keepers’ quarters allowed easy inside access to the 50-foot light tower. The 12-square-foot tower provided space on the first level for the second assistant’s bedroom, a watch room above that and a cleaning room directly under the lantern room. A detached fog signal building was part of the original design, as were quarters for assistant keepers behind the lighthouse.

Until 1910, when the Split Rock Lighthouse was commissioned, Two Harbors had the only beacon directing ships between the Apostle Islands and Duluth-Superior. It also beckoned the dozens of commercial fishermen and other boaters to shelter when darkness or fog caught them at sea.

Although the original Fresnel lens was removed in 1969 and replaced by two 1,000-watt bulbs in each beacon, the light remains an operating navigational aid. Automated in 1981, the Coast Guard continued to use the station until 1987.

The grounds and buildings were leased to Lake County Historical Society in 1990, which gained ownership in 1999. Since then, the head and assistant keepers’ quarters have been renovated into a popular bed-and-breakfast inn. The light is maintained by the society and overnight guests act as “assistant keepers.” The parklike area around the one-acre site was acquired by a developer in early 2003, but remains a popular ship-watching location. The lighthouse accesses an enjoyable paved walking trail along the shore.

Joining the main light now are two additional breakwater lights and a fog signal. A 32-foot light flashes red and a fog signal sits at the end of the eastern breakwater. A light on the west breakwater flashes green.

Another 20-mile drive northeast on Highway 61 takes visitors to the Split Rock Lighthouse State Park, the most visited lighthouse in western Lake Superior and once the most visited lighthouse in the country.

The 1905 Mataafa blow provided the ultimate argument for a lighthouse along Minnesota’s treacherous north shore. Four vessels foundered in that storm near the site where Split Rock would be built, and three lives were lost there.

Armed with the devastation of that storm, the Lake Carriers’ Association pressured the Lighthouse Service to build a lighthouse on the Minnesota shore where mariners  encountered horrendous storms and were bedeviled by compasses that performed erratically due to iron deposits. By 1907, Congress approved the lighthouse and appropriated $75,000 to build the isolated station.

No roads reached the then-isolated location, so the light’s construction began with installation of a derrick to lift supplies from boats up the steep cliff.

Split Rock’s oil-fired lamp was lit for the first time on August 1, 1910, by head keeper Orrin “Pete” Young, brilliantly illuminating the artistic “bi-valve” clamshell Third Order Fresnel Lens that flashed a white beam every 10 seconds. Split Rock would light the way for mariners through 59 years under the leadership of four head keepers.

In 1941, after electricity became available, the oil lamp was replaced by an incandescent light, but the Fresnel lens continued to send its beam as far away as 22 miles from its 168-foot above-water elevation. Decommissioned in 1969, the lens remains in the lamp room and is lit every November 10 in memory of the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The fog signal building at cliffside east of the light tower was equipped with the latest compressed air diaphone that sounded its resonant “BEE-Oh” through two large horns mounted in the roof. The horn was audible five miles at sea.

Three keepers’ houses sit west of the tower. Each had its own barn, although one has since burned. The brick houses were of the latest design and included a bathroom, three bedrooms, kitchen, dining area, living room and cold storage. These incentives made life at the secluded site a bit easier for keepers and their families.

After completion of the nearby highway in 1924, the site became a favorite wayside for motorists. The Lighthouse Service encouraged visits and by the mid-1930s keeper Frank Covell would report more than 30,000 visitors. By 1939, the Coast Guard listed Split Rock as the most visited lighthouse in the country.

The state and Minnesota Historical Society became owners of the popular site in 1971 and undertook painstaking restoration of the light and buildings.

After tenure by Tom Ellig and his family from 1976 to 1982, Lee and Jane Radzak moved into the middle residence. Lee has been head lightkeeper, caretaker, night watchman, resident fix-it man and site manager for 22 years. During that time, visits have increased to more than 150,000 people each year.

To find the lighthouse, watch for signs on Highway 61. There is substantial parking on site, but summer traffic sometimes fills the lots.

Farther up the shore in Grand Marais, three light structures today guide boaters to the inner harbor. But getting the first single light at that site took a lot of doing, according to research by Terry Pepper.

Congress appropriated $6,000 in 1856 to build a light at Grand Marais, but nothing happened. In 1885 a different appropriation of $9,552 sparked construction of a timber-framed, 32-foot pyramid tower. Incorporating salvaged pieces of other lighthouses – including the 1,500-pound fog bell and automatic striking apparatus from the Passage Island Light – the light took shape and its Fifth Order Fresnel Lens was first lit in 1886.

Just as frustrating as getting a light built was getting quarters and status for an official keeper. Acting Keeper Joseph E. Mayhew served the light for 11 years before getting an official home. He left in 1902 when a second light was added in Grand Marais, never having been given the status of “official keeper,” except, oddly enough, for a brief period from September to October that first year.

Today an easterly light marks the end of the breakwater with a 48-foot flashing light and a fog signal. The 32-foot West Breakwater Light flashes green, and a 14-foot light inside the harbor marks the end of the breakwall protecting the Grand Marais Marina. Some of several plans – none yet chosen – for a new marina would eliminate the current breakwall and move or remove the original lighthouse.

Across the international border, lighthouses beckon visitors, but often water transportation is required to get close. Thunder Bay Main Entry Lighthouse marks the center (main) entry through the middle of the more than 4-mile Thunder Bay breakwater that protects the inner harbor from storms.

The 1937 light stands to starboard (right) for inbound traffic. At 49 feet tall, the lamp flashes red with a range of 12 miles in clear weather. The wood-frame building sits on two concrete piers that raise its foundation about 6 feet above the deck of the pier. A 4-by-6-foot storage room is tucked below the main structure. Special handling of the mercury used to float the rotating lens was required when the beacon was automated in the early 1970s. It was also in the 1970s that a ship blundered into the lighthouse and knocked it from its foundation, requiring substantial refurbishing before re-entering service.

While Split Rock’s yellow brick exterior and cliffside location make it one of the most picturesque on Lake Superior, two lighthouse afficionados have chosen another – the final destination on this westerly leg of our look at Lake Superior lighthouses – as their favorite.

Bill and Laurie Penrose in their Friede Publications A Traveler’s Guide to 116 Western Great Lakes Lighthouses, nominate Trowbridge Island Lighthouse as the loveliest light station on the Great Lakes.

Established in 1910, the light is some 15 miles east-southeast of Thunder Bay, a mere speck of rock south of Silver Islet and Tee Harbour off the southeast corner of the Sibley Peninsula. Reachable only by boat or helicopter, the station’s structures occupy nearly all of the island’s buildable area. The octagonal 25-foot reinforced concrete light tower perches astride the very apex of the steep rocky island, about 75 feet above the waterline. An active navigational aid, its Second Order Fresnel lens is still in use in the lantern room, flashing white to warn mariners away from the island and guide them past the tip of the Sibley Peninsula.

The immaculate, red-roofed, white wood-frame buildings perch along cliffy shorelines. Stairways ascend from the dock and a long red-and-white stairway leads to the attractive light tower.

Penrose describes the lighthouse as having “a bright red lantern room that contrasts with the muted colors of the trees below.… Each of the glass panes on the room’s 10 sides claims a different, beautiful view of Lake Superior.”

Maureen Robertson of Thunder Bay has made Trowbridge Island her summer home since 1996 and echoes the Penroses’ description.

“You have a wonderful view in all directions, from Sibley Peninsula to Thunder Bay and to the south and east as far as you can see.”

Maureen says she gets a fair number of visits by sailboaters, power boaters and kayakers from Silver Islet and Thunder Bay. Groups can charter a trip to the island from Thunder Bay.

The Canadian government notified Maureen that this will be the last summer that she can lease the house, “but I’ll wait and see if that happens,” she adds optimistically.

While Maureen will miss the inspiration, solitude and freedom of spending summers on isolated islands in the company of a lighthouse, she would never have traded her chance to experience a taste of life that lightkeepers knew … even if some days meant worrying about a functioning “suer.”

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The Western Lights

Wisconsin Point (Superior South Entry) Lighthouse

• Established: 1913
• Existing Tower: Concrete, round
• Automated: 1970
• Active Lens: Fourth Order Fresnel
• Ownership: U.S. Coast Guard

Minnesota Point Lighthouse

• Established: 1856; first lit 1858
• Existing Tower: Brick, round, in serious disrepair
• Deactivated: 1885
• Lens: Fresnel, removed at decommissioning
• Ownership: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Duluth South Breakwater Outer & Inner Range Lighthouses

• Established: 1901
• Existing Tower: White brick, square
• Automated: 1976 (foghorn, 1972)
• Active Lens: Fourth Order Fresnel
• Ownership: U.S. Coast Guard

Duluth Harbor North Breakwater Lighthouse

• Established: 1910
• Existing Tower: Cast iron, conical
• Active Lens: Fifth Order Fresnel lit by electric lamp
• Ownership: U.S. Coast Guard

Two Harbors Lighthouse

• Established: 1891; first lit 1892
• Existing Tower: Red brick, square
• Automated: 1969
• Lens: Fourth Order Fresnel, removed at automation
• Ownership: Lake County (Minnesota) Historical Society, operated also as a bed-and-breakfast inn

Split Rock Lighthouse

• Established: 1907; First lit, 1910
• Existing Tower: Cream City brick, octagonal
• Deactivated: 1969
• Lens: Third Order Fresnel (in place)
• Ownership: Minnesota Historical Society, operated as museum

Thunder Bay Main Lighthouse

• Established: 1937
• Existing Tower: Wood frame, square
• Active Lens: Modern electric beacon
• Ownership: Canadian Coast Guard

Trowbridge Island Lighthouse

• Established: 1910
• Existing Tower: Reinforced Concrete
• Automated: 1990
• Active Lens: Original Fresnel
• Ownership: Canadian Coast Guard

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Keeping the Lens

When the U.S. Coast Guard deeded Split Rock Lighthouse to the state of Minnesota and the Minnesota Historical Society in 1971, it did something unusual … it left the classic Fresnel lens in place.

Amazing in design and beauty, Fresnel lenses, introduced by French physicist Augustin Jean Fresnel in 1822, were a technological leap for lighthouse beacons, significantly multiplying the lights’ range. Measured in seven orders from the most powerful First Order to the weakest Sixth Order (there is a Three-and-a-half Order), nothing larger than a Second Order was used on Lake Superior.

The Split Rock lens is a Third Order Fresnel, comprised of 252 cut-glass prisms. It measures 7 feet across, 5 feet high and weighs 2-1/2 tons. The prisms are mounted in a brass framework and the clamshell-shaped lens revolves around a central light source, floating on about 250 pounds of mercury. This revolution, driven by the original, hand-cranked clockwork mechanism, causes it to “flash” to passing ships once every 10 seconds when in use.

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Seeing (Other) Lights

Navigational lights come in many sizes to guide mariners. Besides larger lighthouses, other lights are situated on scaffold or skeletal frames. Like major lighthouses, these lights warn navigators away from impediments and give a reference on which to base their route of travel.

In directing inbound vessel traffic to a safe channel, navigational lights signal green to stay starboard (right) and red to stay to port (left). In some cases, the larger lighthouses shine red or green, à la the pierhead lights in the Canal Park.

Sometimes major lighthouses will have partners nearby. Standing 38 feet above the water and flashing red, a light marks the pierhead of the north breakwater near the larger Wisconsin Point (south breakwater) Light and fog signal at the Superior Entry. Within the basin formed by the breakwaters, two additional lights, about 35 feet high, mark the north and south pierheads of the Superior Entry itself. The south light shows green, the north pier light red. One additional 35-foot light flashes green at the inner end of the south pier inside the harbor.

About 15 miles east of Duluth, Knife River is home to a 31-foot tower that flashes green on the westerly side of the entrance to the marina.

The Silver Bay area is marked by three lights privately operated for ships calling at Northshore Mining Company. The 25-foot light on Pellet Island at the end of the west breakwater flashes green, as does a 20-foot light marking the dock face at the entry. The west light aids recreational boaters in finding the Silver Bay Marina, tucked inside the breakwater. On the south side of the east breakwater, a light with fog signal flashes red to inbound ships.

Another commercial site, Taconite Harbor, hosts several navigational lights. At the west entry to the enclosed harbor, flashing green and red beams mark the way from about 25 feet above the water. In addition, two elevated flashing green lights create a range effect for navigating to the dock.

As would be expected with six entry points for boaters, Thunder Bay has numerous lights. Among the largest is a 43-meter structure at the north end of the Welcome Islands signaling 5-second flashes to passing boaters. Off the eastern shoreline of large, rugged Pie Island, tiny Angus Island’s 81 foot light flashes 20 second white beams and the location also boasts a radio beacon to direct navigators around the northeastern tip of Pie Island on their way from or to Thunder Bay.