Two Harbors Lighthouse n the 1940s
Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard
Congress appropriated $10,000 on August 4, 1886 for a lighthouse and keeper’s dwelling at Two Harbors. Frustrated in its attempts to acquire a site on the headlands, the Lighthouse Board decided to place the light on pier-work in Agate Bay and estimated the work could be completed during the 1889 navigation season. Due to the delay in starting the project, Congress had to renew the original $10,000 appropriation in October 2, 1888, and to this they added $5,500 on March 2, 1889, for a fog signal. As the pier in Agate Bay was deemed “so narrow and so exposed to the sea that the station, if built upon it, would be insecure,” the Lighthouse Board decided the station had to be built on the rocky promontory between the two bays. The fog signal boilers and machinery were completed under contract and delivered to the lighthouse depot at Detroit in the first half of 1890, but as the owners of the desired land were “obstinate” and “refused to sell,” the Board had to ask the State of Minnesota to intervene. Condemnation proceedings were initiated in July 1890, and a deed to the site was finally obtained two months later. After plans for a tower with an attached keeper’s dwelling were drawn up, advertisements for the work were circulated, and a contract was awarded in June of 1891. Work on the headland commenced on July 15, 1891. After an approach to the site from the harbor’s breakwater was cleared, blasting for the foundation of the lighthouse was carried out in August and September. Construction continued uninterrupted through the summer and fall, and the lighthouse and fog signal were finished in November, when the fog signal was tested and found to function satisfactorily. Too late to be of service that season, the station was put into operation on April 15, 1892, with Charles Lederle as its first keeper. Two Harbors Lighthouse consists of a two-story, square, redbrick dwelling with gables facing the south and west, and a twelve-foot-square light tower attached to its southwest corner. The tower, built three bricks thick, is surmounted by an octagonal lantern room originally equipped with a fixed, fourth-order Fresnel lens that had a focal plane of forty-three-and-a-half-feet above the ground. The one-story fog signal building, which housed duplicate machinery and boilers for ten-inch steam whistles, was located 100 feet southwest of the lighthouse and was covered with corrugated iron on the outside and plain iron inside. A tramway lead from the station to the shore, 300 feet to the south. In 1921, the kerosene light used in the Fresnel lens was replaced by an electric light that increased the light’s power from 30,000 candlepower to 230,000 candlepower. The fourth-order Fresnel lens, a revolving four-sided lens that had replaced the original fixed lens in 1907, was removed in 1969 and transferred to the Inland Seas Maritime Museum. In its place, a twenty-four-inch aerobeacon was installed that rotates every twenty seconds to produce the following signature: 0.4 seconds of light, 4.6 seconds of darkness, 0.4 seconds of light, and 14.6 seconds of darkness. This beacon remains in use today. The fog signal was discontinued in 1973, and in 1981 the light was automated, allowing its Coast Guard personnel to be stationed elsewhere. In February 2015, the station’s fourth-order Fresnel lens, which had been on display at the Inland Seas Maritime Museum, was returned to Two Harbors and placed in an exhibit case.
No comments:
Post a Comment