by Chad Fraser
But by this time the lighthouse’s heyday was slowly drawing to a close. As shipping traffic through the passage continued to increase, the Canadian government responded by placing lightships and stationary markers in the Pelee Passage itself, which eliminated the need for the Pelee Island lighthouse. The order to suspend operations came down on April 15, 1909 and was signed by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself (from Ronald Tiessen’s Brief History of the Pelee Island Lighthouse):
. . . the Lighthouse Board, Department of Marine and Fisheries, are of the opinion that the light hitherto in operation on Pelee Island, Ontario, is no longer required, as it is not now used for vessels, and recommending that after the 30th June, 1909, the above mentioned light be discontinued and the services of Mr. J.R. Lidwell as keeper dispensed with . . .
Wilfrid Laurier [signed]
With this, the last keeper, J.R. Lidwell, put the lantern out for the last time, descended the spiral staircase, and locked the door behind him.
For many years, this looked like the end of the Pelee Island lighthouse’s story. By the late 1990s, all that remained was the hollowed-out limestone tower, its powerful lantern long since removed. The tight spiral staircase, which had carried successive lightkeepers up to their perch for the night, was almost completely rotted away. And erosion of the beach below was threatening the lighthouse’s very existence. As for the keeper’s dwelling, it did not survive much past the the lighthouse’s closure in 1909. There is no evidence of it at the site today.
But, behind the scenes, a plan was quietly unfolding to bring the old lighthouse back to life. In January 2000, helped by funding from Human Resources Development Canada, the Pelee Island Heritage Centre, Ontario Parks, and the donations of many individuals, a team of architects, carpenters, and even a blacksmith began drawing up plans for its reconstruction. By May, they were hard at work on the site, and on August 19 the completed lighthouse was unveiled to the public, fully restored to its former beauty. The Windsor Star covered the ceremonial luncheon to mark the opening of the restored lighthouse, and reported the event in its August 21, 2000, edition. There, Pelee Island Heritage Centre curator Ronald Tiessen, who was one of the principals in the restoration project, neatly captured the reason why so much effort went into the restoration of the lighthouse: “Because it’s a beautiful structure.”
Photo by author
The interior of the Pelee Island lighthouse prior to its restoration. The spiral staircase was nearly rotted away.
Photo by author
The Pelee Island lighthouse was threatened by decay and shoreline erosion before it was restored in 2000.
Green Island Lighthouse: Trial by Fire
In the lonely lighthouse on Green Island, just twenty kilometres southwest of Pelee Island in American waters, Colonel Charles F. Drake faced a situation more isolated and dangerous than perhaps any other lightkeeper on Lake Erie.
Tiny Green Island, barely eight hectares in size, is not a place you’ll find on many tourist maps. Even many sailors have spent their entire lives on the lake know little of it. At first glance it would appear that the island, barely three kilometres west of South Bass Island and its small settlement at Put-in-Bay, would be a relatively safe place to build a lighthouse. When Lake Erie’s fury erupts, however, there is precious little shelter to be found on the island’s rocky shores, and the scramble for the safety of South Bass can quickly become a long and difficult ordeal. Drake and his small family would learn this lesson the hard way on the evening of December 31, 1863.
Photo by author
The Pelee Island lighthouse, restored to its original beauty.
Green Island’s story actually begins in October 1820, when surveyor Joseph Delafield, conducting the same border survey that would bring him to Pelee Island the following summer, landed at Green Island with his small party and, much to his surprise, uncovered a rich deposit of strontium among the rocks on the island’s eastern shore. In the nineteenth century, strontium was prized for two of its rather unusual abilities; it produces a red tint when used in fireworks and flares, and it was (and remains) useful to farmers for extracting sugar from sugar beet molasses. Delafield excitedly recounted his find in The Unfortified Boundary:
They [the strontium crystals] were of no uniform shape or size. The crystals would weigh from half a pound to four pounds, and we found broken pieces of crystals that must have weighed entirely much more . . . Some are in tables and some in prisms . . . [the strontium] is white, blue and now and then tinged with green, and sometimes a little yellow appears on the white that is transparent.
This small island would go on to become a significant source of strontium. But by the turn of the twentieth century, the deposits had been completely exhausted by industry and collectors from across the globe who had come to see the rare mineral for themselves.
The Green Island lighthouse was built to help guide ships through the treacherous southern passage stretching between the U.S. Lake Erie islands and the Ohio mainland. The American government bought Green Island from Judge Alfred Edwards, owner of a number of islands in the archipelago, in 1851. By 1855, the new lighthouse was finished and fully operational.
Unlike most other lighthouses on Lake Erie, the lightkeeper’s house at Green Island was connected directly to the light tower and, although the tower appears to have been built mainly of locally quarried limestone, the attached quarters were made of wood. The fifty-four-year-old Drake was named the first keeper, and he and his small family — his wife Mary, daughter Sarah, and son Pitt — quickly took up residence there.
The Drakes enjoyed a relatively peaceful eight-year term on Green Island, where Charles, suffering from asthma, likely enjoyed the warm, clear summers of what at the time was still mainly unsettled frontier country. Supplies were brought in by rowboat, and the Drake children often took day trips over to Put-in-Bay, which by this time had started on its way to becoming the lively resort town that it is today.
December 31, 1863, dawned clear and sunny. The weather was unseasonably warm, with the mercury topping out at 15 °C by midday. The citizens of Put-in-Bay were thrilled at this unexpected respite from the bitter winter, and took to the streets, busily socializing and running errands in preparation for that night’s New Year’s celebrations. On Green Island, the Drake family, too, was preparing a holiday feast, while Pitt Drake planned to spend his New Year’s at Doller’s Hall at Put-in-Bay, where the youth of the Bass Islands were planning their own New Year’s party. Early in the afternoon, he set off in the family’s rowboat.
Then this day of strangely warm weather took an even more unexpected, and dangerous, turn. Late in the afternoon, the wind quietly swung around to the northwest and began to pick up, steadily pushing the temperature down as it gained strength. By evening, it had escalated to a gale, and a dusting of snow began to descend on the Lake Erie island chain. As day turned to night, the thermometer dropped an incredible 47 °C, from 15 °C to -32 °C, breaking a low-temperature record in the process.
To the excited partygoers at Doller’s Hall, the first sign of trouble was a sudden chill in the building’s temperature, which quickly drove them from the dance floor to the warmth of a nearby pot-bellied stove. All around them, the building groaned under the force of the intensifying gale.
Suddenly the crowd, gazing out through the window as they tried to keep warm, became transfixed by what appeared to be bright flames shooting up from behind the treetops. A stunned moment passed, then someone burst into the hall and shouted: “Green Island lighthouse is on fire! Green Island lighthouse is on fire!” Local historian Lydia Ryall describes what happened next in her 1913 book, Sketches and Stories of the Lake Erie Islands:
A thrill of horror swept over the group, as swiftly upon each dawned the significance of such a disaster to the light keeper, Colonel Drake and his family alone on the little isle, the wild storm, the darkness, and the tremendous sea cutting them off from all human aid. The keeper’s son, Pitt Drake, who was present in
the hall, became frenzied with forebodings concerning their safety, and only with the greatest difficulty could the young man be restrained from launching forth in a small boat, which would have meant to him certain death.
Any bid to rescue the Drakes was quickly ruled out. The raging lake, whipped into a frenzy by the high winds, was covered in slush and far too dangerous to cross. The waves now reached over nine metres, and literally froze as they crashed onto the shore. Despite Pitt Drake’s anguish at his helplessness, his family was on its own.
On Green Island, the Drakes — Charles, his wife, his son-in-law, and two daughters — had just sat down to dinner when Charles heard a crackling sound. Stepping outside to investigate, he was no doubt astonished to find the whole upper portion of the tower engulfed in flames, fanned by the gale-force winds. He rushed the rest of the family out of the house; they gathered what few possessions they could before fleeing into the raging blizzard.
The Drakes made every effort to fight the blaze, with Charles’s son-in-law climbing a ladder and using damp clothes and pails of water that Drake’s wife and daughters rushed up from the lake, but it was pointless. After emptying nearly thirty bucketfuls, it became obvious that the fire was simply too powerful, and that without the shelter of the keeper’s house, which was attached to the burning tower, the family was at the mercy of the storm.
Charles made one last dash into the house in a bid to find blankets, clothing, or whatever could provide warmth. Finding only an old mattress and a couple of mattress covers, he emerged from the smoke-filled house and led his weary brood to the island’s sole remaining structure — the outhouse. There, squeezed together in the dank and frigid little building, they covered themselves as best they could and proceeded to put in a truly dreadful night.
Back on South Bass, Pitt Drake waited, hoping his family could somehow survive the maelstrom. By dawn, the storm had abated, and the lake now stood silent, its surface frozen over, though precariously so. Pitt quickly roused a small rescue party and, ever so slowly, they made the crossing on wooden planks, placing them end over end, one after the other, until they finally landed at Green Island late in the morning. Full of trepidation, the rescuers fanned out over the island, and were overcome with relief when the found the entire Drake family, partially frozen, but very much alive in the outhouse. Drake’s daughter Sarah was the most affected by the ordeal, with both of her arms frostbitten. Fortunately, however, they were rescued in the nick of time and she made a full recovery. The Sandusky Register picked up the story the following week:
It [the fire] caught from a stovepipe in the upper part of the building and had made such progress, and the wind blowing a gale, that very little was saved. As this was the only house on the Island, and the night so rough that they could not get off, both residents and guests were obliged to shelter themselves in a small outbuilding for the bleak night . . . The light was kept by Col. Charles F. Drake, formerly of this city, who . . . managed to save only two beds, a marine clock and some small articles. The loss to the government will be from $6,000 to $8,000.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the Drakes were given temporary housing at Put-in-Bay, and the government, evidently learning its lesson, quickly replaced the lighthouse with a new structure made completely out of limestone. The new light was in operation by the middle of the summer of 1864. This station would go on to a much longer and far less harrowing career than its predecessor, being tended by many keepers, some of whom kept chickens, cows, and other livestock, which had the run of the island. The light was finally decommissioned in 1939 when, as in many other places on the Great Lakes, lightkeeping on Green Island became an automated affair. It sat vacant while its job was taken over by a light mounted on a metal tower.
Events on Green Island came full circle in April 1974, when the venerable old lighthouse, long deserted, ironically met the same fate as Green Island’s first lighthouse. Two passing fishermen landed on the island and set a small fire, only to lose control of it. The ensuing inferno raged for an entire day. In an eerie parallel to that fateful night in 1863, the flames were visible from the surrounding islands, and subduing the fire was not easy, as northeast Ohio’s News Herald reported in its April 15, 1974, edition:
One 40-foot utility boat was dispatched from the Marblehead station but, because of the wind-whipped lake and lack of docking facilities on the long-abandoned island, had difficulty landing men on the island.
Today, Green Island sees few visitors. Its valuable strontium now long gone, this lonely little island is now home to a wide variety of bird species and the ghosts of not one, but two Lake Erie lighthouses.
Marblehead Lighthouse: A Lake Erie Pioneer
In a picturesque park at the tip of the Marblehead Peninsula, near Sandusky, Ohio, stands the Marblehead lighthouse. White, red, and subtly bell-shaped, the old lighthouse, along with its keeper’s dwelling, is in a perfect state of preservation. An ideal place for a picnic, the Marblehead lighthouse has appeared in countless postcards, photographs, and paintings, and was even commemorated with a postage stamp in 1995 — one of only five American lighthouses to be honoured in this way.
Photo by author
The Marblehead lighthouse, the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the Great Lakes, had two female keepers.
But this old sentinel is more than just a pretty picture. First lit in 1822, the twenty-metre limestone tower, now equipped with an electric light, still guides vessels through Lake Erie’s difficult South Passage, making it the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the Great Lakes.
And its services are still very much in need: the South Passage, which covers the distance between the U.S. Lake Erie islands and the Marblehead Peninsula, is one of the most dangerous places on all of the Great Lakes. With no headlands from the Lake Erie islands all the way to Buffalo at the eastern end of the lake, the winds there can be violent, indeed. As residents of the U.S. Lake Erie islands will tell you: “islanders respect a northeaster,” and when one blows up, it can howl for days at a time, making the Passage a dangerous place for ships, even today.
The Marblehead lighthouse also marks the mouth of Sandusky Bay. Here, there are areas of incredibly shallow water, some less than two metres, creating a nightmare for sailors and increasing the size and strength of the waves during a strong wind. As Harry H. Ross noted in his 1949 book, Enchanting Isles of Lake Erie:
Sandusky Bay is so shallow in places in midsummer that when the water is exceptionally low and calm, one can walk on a sandbar from the Marblehead shoreline almost to the Cedar Point channel [to the east], skirting the west shore of Cedar Point, in water a few inches deep.
The Marblehead lighthouse finds its roots in the very earliest days of settlement on Ohio’s northern coast. Following Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory over the British in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812 (see Chapter 2), the area saw an influx of settlers. At the same time, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and, four years later, the Welland Canal, began to push the Great Lakes from five isolated bodies of water toward the integrated shipping network they are today. More and more ships appeared on Lake Erie and, as in the Pelee Passage to the north, shipwrecks became all too common in the South Passage, often with great loss of life.
By 1819, the need for a lighthouse in the area had become painfully clear. That year, Congress allocated $5,000 for its construction, which was totally insufficient to even start the job, causing it to be delayed until the following year, when, under increased pressure to get the project under way, the federal government doubled the amount to $10,000. Stephen Woolverton, one of the Sandusky area’s earliest residents, was contracted to do the job and he, in turn, subcontracted it to William Kelly, who had built some of the young community’s first stone houses. The hardworking Kelly, whose crew included his thirteen-year-old son, managed to make up for much lost time, and by June 1822 the Marblehead lighthouse was up and running. Built of local limestone, it featured thirteen whale oil-powered lamps. Th
omas Foster, an official from Erie, Pennsylvania, visited the site that June and came away impressed, crowing in a letter to Stephen Pleasonton, the government’s general superintendent of lights, that the lighthouse and its buildings were “completed in a masterly workmanlike manner.”
Benajah Wolcott, a veteran of the revolutionary war and one of the two earliest settlers on the Marblehead Peninsula, was named the first keeper on June 17, 1822. The pioneering Wolcott is an intriguing figure in Ohio’s history. One of the first two settlers on the Peninsula, Wolcott cleared a small parcel of land and built a small log cabin there for his family during the spring and summer of 1809. The Wolcotts had made the long journey from the eastern seaboard to Marblehead, both on foot and by sleigh, over the previous winter. And there was certainly no civilization waiting for them at Marblehead. All that greeted them when they arrived was a dense, untamed wilderness that was sparsely inhabited by Natives of the Ottawa and Wyandot nations, along with a few French traders. To make matters worse, the area’s residents were sharply divided amongst themselves; in the tense environment leading up to the War of 1812, many Ohio Natives were sympathetic to the British, mostly because of what they had deemed to be incursions by American settlers onto their tribal lands. In this environment of fear and terror, it is not difficult to imagine the fear Wolcott must have felt for his young family. He kept his musket close at hand, and vigilantly watched over the surrounding woods for bands of marauding Native warriors.