BIG BAY POINT LIGHTHOUSE-BIG BAY, MICHIGAN

Big Bay Point lighthouse stands on a rocky point halfway between Marquette and Keweenaw Portage Entry. The establishment of a lighthouse at Big Bay Point was recommended by the Lighthouse Board in 1892, as coasting steamers had to change course at the point and there was protected anchorage on either side of the point : Big Bay Point occupies a position midway between Granite Island and Huron Islands, the distance in each case being 15-18 miles. These two lights are invisible from each other and the intervening stretch is unlighted. A light and fog signal would be a protection to steamers passing between these points. They include all the Lake Superior passenger steamers running between Duluth, Buffalo, and Chicago which carry freight and stop between all the important points on the south side of Lake Superior, including Marquette and the copper ports on Portage Lake. Quite a number of vessels have in past years been wrecked on Big Bay Point. A light and fog signal station at Big Bay Point was authorized by an act of Congress on February 15, 1893, and $25,000 for its construction was appropriated on August 18, 1894. After a roughly five acre parcel was acquired in 1895, construction of the station began in May 1896 and was completed the following October. The first structures built at the site were a landing crib and a barn. The crew and supplies were housed in the barn, which had an inside privy in one corner with an outside clean out. The lighthouse was built as a two-story, eighteen-room, redbrick duplex dwelling, with a sixteen-foot-square tower centered on its lakeward side. The tower and lantern room stood nearly sixty-four feet tall, but thanks to the lofty bluffs at the point, the light had a focal plane of eighty-nine feet. In addition to the lighthouse, the station featured two small brick privies, a brick oil house with a metal roof, and a twenty-by-five- foot redbrick fog signal building, which was built a few hundred feet north of the lighthouse. On October 20, 1896, the third-order fixed Fresnel lens, manufactured in France by Henry-Lepaute, went into service. The lens was “fitted with a 3 wick burner same as a 2nd order light and consuming the same quantity of oil.” Four flash panels, fitted in a cost-iron frame, revolved around the lens to produce a brilliant flash every twenty seconds. The weights for revolving the flash panels were housed in a drop tube that ran from the service room down into the basement and had to be wound up every five hours. The station’s fog signal, which also commenced operation on October 20, 1896, was a ten-inch steam whistle, whose water came from a twenty-foot-square crib sunk in Lake Superior. In 1928, a type “F” diaphone, powered by oil-engine-driven air compressors, replaced the obsolete steam whistles. In 1911, additional land surrounding the lighthouse was purchased and cleared to increase the light’s arc of visibility and to provide a more suitable site for a landing and tramway. The lighthouse was manned by a number of keepers over the next forty-three years. In the mid-forties, under the authority of the Coast Guard, the last keeper was reassigned, and the light automated.