EAGLE HARBOR LIGHTHOUSE-EAGLE HARBOR, MICHIGAN

Congress appropriated $14,000 for “repairs and renovation of the original Eagle Harbor light-station” on July 15, 1870, and over the next year, a one-and-a-half-story, seven-room dwelling was constructed with a tower rising from its northeast corner. Built of red brick, the tower is ten feet square at its base, but midway up, its corners are beveled to create an octagonal form. The lighting apparatus,  a fourth-order, L. Sautter Fresnel lens with a fixed, two panels, mounted on a frame, which revolved around the lens to produce a flash every two minutes, from the old lighthouse was transferred to the new decagonal lantern room, where it was mounted atop a cast-iron pedestal. Built in what has been a called a Norman Gothic style, the lighthouse is similar to ones built on the Great Lakes at Chambers Island and Eagle Bluff (1868), McGulpin Point (1869), St. Clair Flats Canal (1871), White River (1875), and Sand Island and Passage Island (1881). In 1890, the Lighthouse Board noted that a steam fog signal would be a valuable addition at Eagle Harbor, but it wouldn’t be until March 2, 1895 that Congress provided $5,000 for its construction. The ten-inch steam whistle was in operation for roughly 300 hours each year and consumed around 26 tons of coal, but in 1907, the fog signal blasted for a record 544 hours, while being fed 43 tons of coal. A thirty-foot-long, rubblestone seawall was built in front of the fog signal building in 1903, and in 1905, a three-foot-square brick chimney replaced the iron smokestacks formerly used.  At the opening of navigation in 1894, the period of the flash that accompanied Eagle Harbor’s fixed white light was reduced from two minutes to one minute. The intensity of the light was increased eight-fold on June 20, 1913, by changing the illuminant from oil to incandescent oil vapor. In 1924, ruby glass was placed over one of the flash panels, changing the light’s characteristic to a fixed white light with alternating red and white flashes. The lighthouse itself was made more visible to mariners during daylight hours, when the side of the tower facing the lake was painted white on April 13, 1925. An air diaphone was installed in the fog signal building in 1928, and the following year a radiobeacon was established at the station as an additional aid to mariners navigating in thick weather.   The Coast Guard replaced the fourth-order Fresnel lens in 1962 with a pair of DCB-224 aerobeacons that produce alternating red and white flashes. Eagle Harbor Lighthouse was de-staffed on January 8, 1982, when Jerry McKinney, who had been serving there for less than a year, was transferred. This change left Two Harbors Lighthouse in Minnesota as the only staffed lighthouse on Lake Superior. The Keweenaw County Historical Society was granted temporary stewardship of the lighthouse property in 1982 and then full ownership in 1999, after the Coast Guard excessed the station.