Rawley Point Lighthouse in 1895
Photograph courtesy of National Archives
The Lighthouse Board’s repeated requests in 1871 and 1872 for funding for Twin River Point Lighthouse were finally answered with a $40,000 appropriation on March 3, 1873, and construction of the lighthouse began the following August. For some reason, Lighthouse Board records refer to the point almost exclusively as Twin River Point, though in 1888, it was listed as “Twin River Point, on Rawley’s Point.” Since 1956, the Coast Guard has referred to the lighthouse as Rawley Point Light. Progress was slow due to difficulty in landing materials and quicksand encountered while digging the foundations. By the time work for the year was suspended on November 7, a sturdy base for the tower’s limestone foundation stones had been established by driving a network of wooden pilings into the sand and then topping them by a grillage of cross timbers and a cement cap. Work resumed on April 23, 1874, and by the end of June, the tower had risen nineteen feet above the water table, its first landing and stairs had been set, the dwelling’s walls were finished, and its roof had been shingled. The tower and dwelling were completed in October, but due to the late arrival of the station’s third-order Fresnel lens, the inaugural lighting was delayed until December 7, 1874. However in 1890, the light tower, due to defective brick used in its construction, was in poor condition. The efforts to strengthen the tower proved ineffective, as the Lighthouse Board noted in 1894 that since the tower at Rawley Point continued “to crack and crumble,” plans were being made to relocate the metal tower from the discontinued Chicago River Lightstation, increase its height, and re-erect it a Rawley Point. A contract was made for providing the additional metalwork required, and the material for constructing a foundation for the new tower was delivered at the station in 1894. That September, excavations for the foundations for the eight support columns were made, concrete piers were poured, the foundation disks and cylinders bases were set, and the first section of the tower was erected just west of the dwelling. In October, 166,000 pounds of metalwork had been erected, completing the fourth story and bringing the structure up to the main gallery deck. The main deck, service room, watchroom, and lantern were completed in November, and the illuminating apparatus was transferred from the old brick tower to the iron tower on November 20, 1894. The new skeleton iron tower, which stands 111 feet tall, is the tallest lighthouse on the Great Lakes. In 1904, the clockwork mechanism for revolving the third-order lens was removed from the tower and taken to the district machine shop in Milwaukee, where it was thoroughly overhauled before being shipped back to Rawley Point. In the interim, the characteristic of the light was temporarily changed from fixed white, varied by a white flash every thirty seconds, to a fixed white light. A brick cistern was constructed on the east side of the dwelling in 1906, and a well was drilled to a depth of 103 feet to serve as a water supply for the station. The worn-out steam fog signal was replaced by an oil-engine-driven air compressors and a type G diaphone that commenced operation on September 23, 1919. The tower’s third-order Fresnel lens was removed in 1952, after one of its prisms was damaged, and twin DCB-36 aerobeacons were installed. Rawley Point Lighthouse was staffed until 1979, when the station became fully automated. The present optic was installed in 1987. The keepers’ dwelling at Rawley Point is currently used as a rental cottagee for Coast Guard personnel.
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