Bois Blanc Island Lighthouse - 1904
Photograph Courtesy National Archives
NAVIGATION - STRAITS OF MACKINAC/LAKE HURON
On May 23, 1828, Congress appropriated $5,000 for a lighthouse on Bois Blanc Island; the first of three lighthouses that were built. Due to poor engineering and construction, and an unordinary rise in the Lake’s water the first two eventually collapsed. The Lighthouse Board were notified apparently that when concern that lighthouses were built in a very economical manner, the resulting structures didn’t always last. An 1866 report noted that Bois Blanc Lighthouse was of a “defective style and pattern” and “in a very dilapidated condition.” The Lighthouse Board requested $14,000 for a new lighthouse, and this amount was granted by Congress on March 2, 1867. Work on the third Bois Blanc Lighthouse, the one that remains standing today, began on July 1, 1867 and wrapped up later that year. Unlike its predecessors which had a detached tower, the 1867 lighthouse consisted of a yellow-brick, one-and-a-half-story dwelling with a square tower attached to its lakeward end. In 1884, the station’s boathouse was moved to a more sheltered location on the south side of the island, where a new landing dock was built. A brick cistern was placed in the dwelling’s cellar in 1891, and the lighthouse’s downspouts were extended to it. A well was also sunk in 1891 near the beach east of the lighthouse and equipped with a pump and rubber house to augment the dwelling’s water supply and to provide fire protection. Height: Tower – 38’ (12 m), Focal Height: Focal plane -53’ (16 m). Original lens in the third lighthouse was a Fourth order Fresnel lens – which was removed. Bois Blanc Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1924, and in its place, a light was displayed from a forty-six-foot-tall black skeleton tower near the shore. The light was moved in 1942 and placed atop a white skeleton tower, which served as a better daymark. The current cylindrical tower near Bois Blanc Lighthouse was erected in 1986.
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