POINTE AUX BARQUES LIGHTHOUSE-MICHIGAN

                                                                                       Point Aux Barques lighthouse in 1904
                                                                                    Photograph courtesy of National Archives

The extreme northeast tip of Michigan's "thumb" is named Point aux Barques, French for Point of the Little Ships. This rocky cape marks the transition between Lake Huron and Saginaw Bay, and was a critical point for mariners. Congress appropriated $5,000 for a lighthouse on Pointe aux Barque on March 3, 1847. During 1847, a sixty-five-foot tower was constructed and equipped with nine lamps set in fourteen-inch reflectors to produce a fixed white light. Peter L. Shook was appointed first keeper of the lighthouse on March 3, 1848 and likely placed the light in operation at the opening of navigation that year. A new lighthouse, linked to a dwelling by a covered passageway, was built at Pointe aux Barques in 1857 by Alanson Sweet, Luzene Ransom, and Morgan Shinn, who were awarded contracts to rebuild several stations in Michigan around this time. The new tower, built of yellow brick, stood seventy-nine feet tall and had a focal plane of eighty-eight feet above the surrounding water. Its decagonal lantern room housed a third-order lens that, with the opening of navigation in the spring of 1858, exhibited a fixed white light varied every two minutes by a flash. The one-and-a-half-story keeper’s dwelling, also built using yellow brick, measured twenty-seven by twenty-nine feet with an attached twelve-by-fifteen-foot kitchen.  In 1867, the third-order Fresnel lens from Pointe aux Barques was exchanged for the fixed, third-order lens in use at Fort Gratiot Lighthouse. Due to the number of lights exhibited at the railway depot and other buildings near Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, the Lighthouse Board felt it needed a flashing characteristic to make it more visible to mariners. A third-order Henry-Lepaute Frensel lens was installed in Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse in 1873 to give the light a characteristic of a white flash every ten seconds. On June 28, 1914, the light’s illuminant was changed from oil to incandescent oil vapor, increasing the intensity of the light to 38,000 candlepower. The light was electrified in 1932, further increasing its intensity to 120,000 candlepower. The Henry-Lepaute third-order Fresnel lens was removed from Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse in 1969, when a modern optic was installed in the tower.