Sturgeon Point lighthouse in 1904
Photograph courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard
A lighthouse was built on Tawas Point near the northern entrance of Saginaw Bay, in 1857, and one was erected on Thunder Bay Island in 1832, but these lights were unable to fully illuminate the roughly fifty-five-mile gap between them. In 1866, the Lighthouse Board proposed that a lighthouse be erected near the midpoint of this gap. Congress appropriated the requested $15,000 on March 2, 1867, and efforts began to secure a title to the desired parcel on Sturgeon Point. Plans for the lighthouse were approved July 6, 1868, and after a deed for just over sixty acres on the point was formalized on September 22, 1868, work commenced the following spring. Excavation for the lighthouse was made at a location roughly 100 feet from the shoreline, and a limestone block foundation, which is seven-and-a-half feet high and extends four feet above the surface of the ground, was laid for a conical tower with attached keeper’s dwelling. The circular brick tower gently tapers from a diameter of sixteen feet at its base to ten feet at the lantern room gallery, while its walls decrease from a thickness of four-and-a-half feet to eighteen inches over the same distance. The tower stands seventy-feet, nine inches tall, and its decagonal, cast-iron lantern room, which came from a lighthouse in Oswego, New York, is reached by a spiral stairway with three landings that winds up the tower. Four windows, one facing each of the cardinal points of a compass, provide light for the tower’s interior. A third-and-a-half-order, Henry-Lepaute Fresnel lens was mounted atop a cast-iron pedestal in the lantern room to produce a fixed white light that could be seen for up to fifteen miles. An eleven-foot-long covered passageway connects the tower to the two-story, brick dwelling, which had eight rooms for the keeper and his family. An iron door was installed at the entrance to the tower from the passageway to prevent fire from spreading between the tower and dwelling, both of which were painted white. The lighthouse was completed in early November 1870, and its light was scheduled to be exhibited that month. However, Perley Silverthorn, the first keeper, was late in arriving to the lighthouse, and it was decided to postpone the inaugural lighting until the opening of navigation the following spring. The tower’s Fresnel lens was somehow damaged in 1887. A news lens was installed in the tower, and the old lens was shipped to the general lighthouse depot on Staten Island for repair. Whether or not the original third-and-a-half-order, Henry-Lepaute lens was ever returned to the lighthouse, it is known that a lens of that description was in the lantern room in 1910 and remains there today. In 1893, a brick-lined circular iron oil house, with a capacity of seventy-two, five-gallon oil cans was built 100 feet south of the lighthouse. Also that year, a brick cistern was added beneath the dwelling’s living room, and the conductor pipes from the residence were redirected to feed the cistern. On April 15, 1913, the characteristic of the light was changed from fixed white to a white flash every three seconds through the introduction of an automated acetylene lighting apparatus. Louis Cardy was hired as keeper of the lighthouse in 1882, and he served for thirty-two years until his passing in November 1913 at the age of eighty-one. With the light now automated, a new keeper was not appointed. Rather, the coastguardsmen at the adjacent station were assigned to keep an eye on the light. Sturgeon Point Lighthouse had fallen into serious disrepair by the time the Alcona Historical Society obtained a lease on the property in 1982. The station’s buildings were restored as part of a three-year volunteer project, and they are now run as a maritime museum and historical site.
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