MISSION POINT LIGHTHOUSE-MICHIGAN

In October 1863, a committee, assigned by the Lighthouse Board to visit potential sites for lighthouses along the Great Lakes and in New England, recommended that a lighthouse be built at the tip of Old Mission Peninsula to guide maritime traffic in Grand Traverse Bay. Congress appropriated $6,000 for a lighthouse at the northern tip of the peninsula on March 3, 1859, but land for the structure was not purchased until 1869, due, in part, to the intervening Civil War. Construction was carried out during 1870, and the lighthouse was lit for the first time on September 10 of that year by Jerome M. Pratt, who had previously served as keeper of Skillagalee Lighthouse. Mission Point Lighthouse consists of a one-and-a-half-story frame dwelling, measuring thirty by twenty-eight feet, with a square tower protruding from its lakeward gable. The center of the lantern room is thirty-five feet above the ground, but the bluff on which the lighthouse stands gave the fixed white light, produced by the tower’s fifth-order Fresnel lens, a focal plane of forty-eight feet above the bay.  Over the years, a few additions were made to the lighthouse. In 1889, a 200-foot-long and 4-foot-high crib was built and filled with stone to protect the shore in front of the lighthouse. That same year, a brick cistern was built, and a pump was placed in the kitchen to draw the water. A new woodshed was put up in 1894, and in 1898, a brick oil house was added to store the volatile kerosene, which was being used as the illuminant at that time. In 1911, a bell buoy, painted with red and black horizontal stripes, was established off Mission Point to mark the northern end of the shoals that extend from the peninsula. Though its importance had been reduced, Mission Point Lighthouse continued to be staffed until June 30, 1933, when Emil C. Johnson, its last keeper, left. In 1938, the offshore bell buoy, which by then was lit, was replaced by a new structure known as Mission Point Light. The structure is a circular black cylinder of interlocking steel sheet piling filled with stone and capped with concrete. On the pier thus provided is erected a skeleton steel tower and small steel house elevated above the pier deck on four circular cylinders for protection from ice and wave action. The light is a 200 m.m. lantern fitted with a battery operated electric light showing a white flash of 330 c.p., 1 second duration every 10 seconds. The steel skeletal tower atop the circular pier has since been replaced by a cylindrical tower.