The Awakening

The Old Presque Isle Lighthouse at Lake Huron, MI was built in 1840. Although the tower is only thirty-eight feet high, its wall is twelve feet in diameter at the bottom with a thickness of three feet two inches. The wall tapers in until a diameter of six feet at the lantern room where the wall is one foot four inches thick. A unique feature is its stone stairway. This lighthouse was restored in 1959 and converted into a museum.

I saw this lighthouse in 1998 which was in the early days of my visiting lighthouses. Although I had seen and photographed a few lighthouses before this one, I had not gone inside and had paid little attention to their design, engineering, or the materials and skills involved in building a lighthouse. Those elements evidently didn’t stir my interest as they were not part of my job or training before retiring from the Army.

In my book, The Wickie, I wrote in the author’s note: “My initial thought was if you had seen one lighthouse, you probably had seen them all.” However, when I saw the steps of the Old Presque Isle Lighthouse, I suddenly realized how wrong I had been. Those stone steps, cut approximately three feet long, eight inches thick and eight to ten inches wide, had skillfully been cut and laid along the wall forming a circular stairway to the top. This fascinated me. Since that awakening, I’ve learned many things about lighthouses to include that steps, in the early years, were built of wood. Since then, they have also been built of steel and or concrete.