RASPBERRY ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE-RASPBERRY ISLAND, WISCONSIN

The collection of islands off the Bayfield Peninsula in northern Wisconsin was named for the twelve apostles of the New Testament by Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit traveler and historian. The name Apostle Islands applies to the islands collectively, even though there are actually twenty-two of them; none of them actually carry the name of one of the apostles. Raspberry Island received its name because it is just offshore from where the Raspberry River empties into Raspberry Bay.Lighthouses had been built on Michigan Island in 1857 and Long Island in 1858 to guide mariners along the South Channel through the Apostle Islands. This route was convenient for vessels coming to Bayfield and Chequamegon Bay from the east, but mariners arriving from the west needed a beacon to guide them through the West Channel. Congress appropriated $6,000 on March 3, 1859 for a lighthouse on Raspberry Island to fulfill this role. When built in 1862, Raspberry Island Lighthouse was a two-story, rectangular dwelling with a square tower rising from the center of its pitched roof. The light from the tower’s fifth-order, fixed lens was exhibited for the first time on July 20, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, with Andrew Cramer as its keeper. By 1867, the characteristic of the light was changed from fixed white to a white light punctuated by a white flash every ninety seconds through the installation of three flash panels mounted on a cast iron frame that revolved around the lens. Every four hours, the keeper had to wind up the weights that powered the clockwork mechanism for producing the flashes. In 1880, the illuminant for the light was changed from lard oil to kerosene. A detached brick oil house for storing the more volatile fluid was not built until 1901. During 1902, materials for a fog signal building were purchased, and a $2,807 contract for the boilers and related machinery for a steam fog whistle was entered into with Optenberg and Sonneman of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. In preparation for building the fog signal in 1903, a tramway was installed at Raspberry Island in 1902 to haul the construction materials and coal form the landing wharf to the top of the forty-foot bluff on which the station was located. A type F diaphone fog signal, sounded by compressed air produced by an oil engine, replaced the steam whistle in 1932. Raspberry Island Light was electrified in 1914, and its characteristic changed to three seconds of light followed by a two-second eclipse. The final keeper at Raspberry Island was Earl Seseman. He and a coastguardsman closed down the station in October 1947, after which the fog signal was a CO₂-powered bell. The station’s Fresnel lens was removed in 1957, and a light mounted on a pole took over the function of guiding mariners.