Category: History
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Presque Isle Lighthouse
Presque Isle State Park; Erie, Pennsylvania (August 3, 2003) Pennsylvania doesn’t have very much coastline. It’s completely landlocked except for a scant 50-mile shore where a notch was taken from New York to provide it access to Lake Erie. A small peninsula along an otherwise smooth coastline juts into Lake Erie, and this is the…
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Owls Head Light
Owls Head (Rockland Harbor), Maine (August 2009) Owls Head Light sits spectacularly on a scenic outcrop, easily accessible from nearby Rockland, Maine. Quite simply it involves an easy swing along the southern shore of Rockland Harbor to the Town of Owls Head. From there follow Lighthouse Road to its terminus at the large parking lot…
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Ocracoke Light Station
Ocracoke Island, North Carolina (March 2012) The primary reason we went through the trouble of riding the ferry to Ocracoke Island from Hatteras was to see the old lighthouse (map). Construction of this version occurred in 1823 although lighthouses watched over Ocracoke Inlet since 1795. The need had long been established. English explorers first wrecked…
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Sullivan’s Island Lighthouse
Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina (September 2008) The lighthouse on Sullivan’s Island (map) is an oddity. It doesn’t look like any other lighthouse that I’ve ever seen before or since. Sure it’s a towering structure and it throws light far out to sea, but its appearance is downright strange. Most noticeably the tower takes a triangular…
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Morris Island Lighthouse
Charleston, South Carolina (September 2008) The Morris Island lighthouse (map) has the classic appearance of what a lighthouse “should” look like. I took this long-range photograph taken from several miles away at Fort Sumter. It doesn’t do it much justice, but you can just make out the alternating black and white horizontal bands painted onto…
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Milwaukee Breakwater Light
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (2008) A four mile concrete breakwater protects Milwaukee harbor and the mouth of its river from cruel and punishing storms that form on Lake Michigan and slam against the shoreline. Ships accessing the protective waters of the harbor sail through a small aperture. The Milwaukee Breakwater Light marks the approach (map). The…
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Marshall Point Lighthouse
Port Clyde, Maine (August 2009) The Marshall Point Lighthouse appears as the second lighthouse featured in this video I took while traveling around Port Clyde and Muscongus Bay in southeastern Maine (map). This lighthouse can be visited on an easily accessible stretch of the mainland. It also features a museum open to the public during…
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Key West Lighthouse
Key West, Florida (April 2009) A light rose early in the history of Key West — 1826 — just seven years after the territory of Florida became part of the United States. The original brick structure of the lighthouse towered sixty-five feet above the southernmost point of the island, illuminating seaward through the power of…
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Jones Point Light
City of Alexandria, Virginia, USA (2000) Only Jones Point light remains as a lighthouse on the Potomac River. It dates back to 1856. The land on which it rests returned to the Commonwealth of Virginia only ten years earlier. I mention this because I first stumbled across the Jones Point Light while conducting field research…
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More South Florida Lighthouses
Broward and Monroe Counties, Florida (April 2009) The lighthouse at Hillsboro Inlet came to the coast rather recently, having been first lit in 1907 (map). This section of coastline sits at the northernmost reach of the Florida Reef and mariners needed sufficient warning when approaching the underwater coral to avoid damaging their vessels. This became…