Tawas Point Lighthouse in 1913
Photograph courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard
On March 3, 1875, Congress appropriated $30,000 for a “light-house on Ottawa Point, or for range to guide into Tawas Bay, on the northeast shore of Saginaw Bay, to be known as Tawas Light.” The Lighthouse Board decided to build the new lighthouse on a shoal, south of Tawas Point, in four feet of water. Work on the tower and dwelling began on August 12, 1876 and was finished by the end of the year. During the winter, the Fresnel lens was transferred from the old tower to the new tower, and the light was exhibited from the new lighthouse on the opening of navigation in 1877. The new, conical tower measured sixty-seven feet, three inches, from its base to the ventilator ball atop its decagonal lantern room, and its diameter tapered from sixteen feet to nine feet, eight inches. Connected to the tower by a covered passageway was a redbrick, two-story dwelling that had eight rooms for the keeper and his family. In September 1884, a crib protection, 130 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 4 feet high, was added to the northwest corner of the lighthouse’s existing cribwork and filled with stone and brick cannibalized from the old lighthouse. Additional cribwork protection was added the following year to the north and southwest sides of the station. All the necessary timber for the work was obtained on the nearby beach, and the fill was again from the old lighthouse, so the only expense for the Lighthouse Service was labor. On September 1, 1891, a new fourth-order, Sautter, Lemmonier, & Cie. Fresnel lens was installed in place of the old fifth-order lens, increasing the power of the light and changing its characteristic to twenty-five seconds of white light, followed by a five-second eclipse. The eclipse was produced by a hood around the lamp that was raised and lowered by a clockwork mechanism. Work on adding a fog signal to the station began in June 1899, when foundation trenches were dug and footings were laid five-eighths of a mile southwest of the lighthouse – clearly, the point had continued to grow since the completion of the lighthouse twenty-three years earlier. A brick fog signal building, measuring forty-two by twenty-two feet and equipped with a cement floor and a hipped roof, was built to house a ten-inch steam whistle, which was ready for operation on September 28, 1899. The fog signal building was surrounded by a cribbing of logs and linked to the lighthouse by a telephone system, a boardwalk, and a tramway. As it owned over seventy acres on Tawas Point, the Lighthouse Service decided to launch a reforestation project on the reservation to produce timber for construction. Roughly 20,000 Norway pines were planted in October 1927 on a thirteen-acre parcel. Trees planted behind hillocks of sand or in beach grass fared much better than those fully exposed to the wind coming off the lake. By the end of 1922, the surviving trees were between two and three feet in height, and the project was deemed “undoubtedly a success." On May 22, 1915, the intensity of Tawas Point Light was increased through the introduction of an incandescent oil vapor lamp. An air diaphone, powered by oil-engine-driven air compressors, took the place of the steam whistle on October 27, 1928. Tawas Point Lighthouse was staffed until 1953, when Leon DeRosia, who had been keeper at the station for six years, accepted a transfer to Grays Reef on Lake Michigan.
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