In the late 1990s, Glenn Cobb, manager of Grand Lake St. Marys State Park, mentioned that he would like to see a lighthouse on all four sides of the lake. This sounded like a good idea to Stan Grimm, co-owner of Behm’s Landing and Restaurant, located on the southern shore of the lake, opposite Northwood Lighthouse. “If you’ve been on the lake, you recognize the need for some bearing of some sort because everything looks the same at night,” Grimm said. After years of planning, Behm’s Lighthouse, an octagonal, forty-eight-foot-tall lighthouse sitting on a small offshore island, was dedicated on April 19, 2003 to the memory of Stanley Mike Grimm, who was killed in an auto accident on April 25, 1997. The steel frame for the lighthouse was designed by Mark Severt of St. Marys and assembled by Lefeld Welding before being moved to the island. The lighthouse, which has a diameter of twelve feet at its base and five feet at its top, is covered in stucco-like material and has an interior stairway for servicing the beacon, which was purchased from a company in Texas. Now just the lake’s east shore is missing a lighthouse.
Bill Jasperson built Northwood Lighthouse, also known as “Eddystone,” in 1923 as a “drawing card” for his Northwood Subdivision. Located on the north shoreline, the light, reportedly equipped with a Fresnel lens taken from a lighthouse off Cuba, originally operated under a government license and functioned as a seasonal aid to navigation from April through November. Though the light is no longer active, it is impressive that it ever was, considering Grand Lake St. Marys is a man-made reservoir. More important than its brief career as a navigational aid is Northwood Lighthouse’s role as a monument to one of its early ancestors. The fifty-foot conical tower stands as a two-thirds scale replica of and a tribute to the famous Eddystone Lighthouse in the English Channel.
Celina Rotary Lighthouse is a unique light, not because of its age or history, but because of its location. While lighthouses are usually constructed to provide aid to vessels navigating dangerous open waters or shores, Celina stands on the west bank of Grand Lake St. Marys, a man-made lake near the city of Celina, Ohio. Built in 1986 as a project of the local Rotary Club, this forty-foot lighthouse is functional, but acts more as an observation tower than a navigational aid. On occasion, however, mariners trying to reach the small marina located near the lighthouse do take advantage of the tower’s private aid to navigation that is exhibited at a focal plane of fifty feet. The conical tower sits on a circular stone base, which functions as an observation platform. A wrought iron staircase curls around the base and a banister circles the observation deck.
