(waves lapping) (soft music) - Lake Erie is a dangerous lake.

Storms come up like that.

(thunder clapping) - In the old days, it was very easy to pick out where the lights were.

That's all that was lit up along the shoreline.

- These keepers, what they went through just to keep a light burning, it was a rough life.

- We want to preserve history and that's what it's about, preserving the history, all in a nutshell.

(soft music) (gentle music) - Lighthouses on Lake Erie are incredibly important and it really, I think it raises the bar for the other Great Lakes in the sense that Lake Erie, which is the shallowest of all the lakes, is the most dangerous because of its shallowness, because of its position in relation to the jet stream.

When we look at the distribution of shipwrecks across the Great Lakes, lake Erie, out of those 8,000 per surface square mile has 2000, probably, shipwrecks in it, which makes it the most dangerous of all the Great Lakes, which make the lighthouses on Lake Erie that much more important.

- Lighthouses serve three purposes.

They ensure free and easy traffic patterns for ships.

And the other one will enable a captain to find a port, mark the location of a harbor entrance.

And then the other one, which would be to mark a place of danger that you would avoid.

- The lighthouse is the beacon for you to come into the harbor.

That's the purpose of the lighthouse.

It's also for your safety.

If something should happen and the Coast Guard's out there, they can get somebody to you.

- Storms come up on Lake Erie much quicker than they do on some of the other lakes, and the shallowness of the water makes navigation very difficult, particularly in the 19th century.

If you're in a wooden boat and you're in the Western basin of Lake Erie, which only has an average depth of 40 feet.

- Lighthouses have been just critical for safe navigation, and so the development of and improvement of navigational aids in general has been a priority for the US government from the very inception.

- Lake Erie is a dangerous lake.

Storms come up like that, and we get these northeasterns, so we have people now come and watch the waves.

But in 1850, one of the lighthouse keepers documented waves being halfway up the tower, so the biggest wave documented was 25 foot.

I'm the president of the Marblehead Lighthouse Historical Society.

My wife and I have been volunteers for about five years, and the Historical Society has about 70 volunteers that work 101 days every year.

- You've got three basic types of lighthouses.

The one would sit on the end of a pier, pierhead lighthouse, and then another one would sit on the land.

Also, then you would have one on an isolated rock or a reef.

I've always been very interested in history, all kinds, especially nautical and especially how it pertains in to Vermilion and the surrounding area, the Firelands, Western Reserve and so on.

- In Toledo, it's on what they call a crib.

It's a crib light.

They built basically a wooden box and they towed it out there and set it down in the water, filled it with rocks and gravel and all kinds of stuff.

Then capped it off with concrete, and then the lighthouse was actually built on top of the concrete.

- Originally, I started, I was just a member that, you know, did things that go to festivals and stuff.

And around 2008, I actually took over the membership part of it, so you know, I take care of that.

Really, the best part that I like about the lighthouse is the history of it.

We've spent some time at the National Archives in Washington, DC and various places where we could find information about the lighthouse.

So now, they tell me I'm the historian also.

(chuckling) - One of the advantages that we had here at Fairport is our lighthouse is up on a hill, so you didn't have to make it as tall in order to be seen out in the lake pretty far, because the hill provided a lot of that range for you.

The buildings that are on this property are the tower, the keeper's quarters here that we're sitting in right now, and the oil house where flammable liquids were kept.

I have raced my sailboat on all five of the Great Lakes, going from port to port, telling the stories of the Great Lakes, Fairport Harbor, and I'm a trustee and the historian at the Fairport Harbor Marine Museum.

Telling that story to other people is what I really enjoy.

- Some of 'em are shaped like ours, like a house.

Marblehead, it's a round one.

It all depends on the architect or the government of what style they wanted.

See, I was president of a historical society in Lorain, the Port Authority approached us and said, "We're going to have a fundraiser.

Would you guys be interested in being involved?"

So my wife and I got involved.

That's where it started.

I came out and I liked what was going on.

It grew on me.

- We are sitting in a replica of the 1902 Boathouse.

I've been doing this for roughly 12 years and loving every minute of it.

I was born and raised here, but I spent the last 20 years in Alaska and I come back to my hometown, missing Lake Erie, and then I ran into somebody who was on this committee that was restoring the old lighthouse, and I said, "Well, what old lighthouse?” I didn't know we ever had a lighthouse.

- Fairport Harbor West Lighthouse has five floors.

There's a basement level, a main living level, upstairs where the bedrooms are, service level, and then finally the top of the tower, what some people call the widow's walk.

When I found the lighthouse, it was very much in disrepair.

I came along and I came from out of town, and certainly in the early years there was a bit of a challenge and I tried to get out in the community, have the open house, invite people in, provide tours, but mainly because they haven't had the opportunity before.

They have looked at the outside, they have lived here, they have driven by, been by in a boat, and they really want to see the inside.

So I'm just a steward.

This will go on long after me, but I hope it will live in perpetuity.

(gentle music) These stairs lead to the lantern room.

The lantern is where the beacon is kept.

The beacon is still maintained by the US Coast Guard, comes on every night at dusk and goes off at dawn and has a set pattern.

- It's still an active lighthouse.

When we gained possession of the lighthouse, one of the rules was that we have to allow the Coast Guard access.

They still have the actual light itself, which is now run by solar panels, and they also have a foghorn out there.

Yeah, the lighthouse has seven floors, and the first floor is the basement.

It's actually in the crib.

The lighthouse itself has three living floors, and then, you go up one more and you're in the attic, and right in the middle of the attic, there's a circular staircase up into the watch room, which is the metal part sitting on the roof, and then there's a ladder that takes you up into the actual lantern room, which would be the seventh floor.

It doesn't look like it's big enough, but there's, yeah, seven floors.

- The first floor is the engine room.

It has a generator to back up in case the power goes down at the lighthouse, and it has two small motors that supply air to the foghorns, and there's a case upstairs that the foghorns are mounted and the original trumpets are here on the wall.

If you're out in the fog and you listen for the foghorns, each one has a different sound to it.

If Lorain is like one long blast, one short, you look on your navigational map and you can tell where you're at, what location you're in.

- If you look at a map or a chart of the Great Lakes, you'll see that Lake Erie is the farthest south, it's also the shallowest.

Therefore, it gets warmer on Lake Erie than it does on any of the Great Lakes, and it freezes first - Here, our shipping season probably went from late March because the ice is gone, and it might end end of December.

- Nowadays, you don't have that much ice, so it's mostly year round shipping.

- Lighthouses, from the very inception of the country, were an essential part of commerce in America.

If you go back to when Lake Erie was first developed back in the early 1800s, and all these different cities built up from nothing.

They were of course interested in commerce, specifically lake commerce.

- If you wanted to go anywhere else in the Great Lakes, you had to go past Fairport.

In the 1830s and 1840s, this was a supply port for boats that were coming from the East Coast through the Erie Canal and up to the upper lakes, and at that time then we had iron ore that was being shipped in.

Then they would load coal and take the coal back up the lakes.

So it was pretty much iron ore coming in, coal going out.

We had quite a bit of fishing that went on.

That was a pretty big commodity.

Today, it's still a pretty busy harbor.

We have a lot of limestone for building materials and roads.

Then Morton Salt has a mine that is about a half a mile down and out underneath the lake.

Those are the two things that go out of this harbor.

- There's a current that runs from east to west, close to the shore, and so as a result, sand is washed across the entrances to these rivers and creeks.

You have to keep dredging that then in order to let shipping or boats come in here, and that is why you build a pier.

- Like in Lorain, the reason why it was put out here was due to the sand build up in the harbor, and they wanted to stop that, so they put it out in the water.

- Immediately, there was the need to have lighthouses on the end of those piers so that after dark, people could come safely in and out, and so they would build these little wooden pier lights.

They built dozens of these throughout the Great Lakes, and eventually they would be replaced by more expensive structures using brick and stone and so forth.

They were never meant to be permanent.

The little town of Port Clinton comes along.

We had no big industry, so there was no need for a big channel.

Once they built the piers, which were completed in the early 1880s, then they had a need for a lighthouse, and they petitioned the government for like 15 years to get a lighthouse at the end of the pier.

- In the old days, it was very easy to pick out where the lights were, and the reason was that's all that was lit up along the shoreline.

Now, when you come in, there's so many backlights that it's a lot more difficult unless you know the right characteristics for your light.

During the day, the lights aren't on.

They have what they call day markers, and the lighthouses are actually day markers.

On the chart, it would call our lighthouse a brown sandstone lighthouse.

Many people have seen lighthouses with stripes, barber pole patterns, diamonds, squares, those are all things that are day markers, so you can tell which lighthouse you're looking at, and there were no two lighthouses that had the same characteristics within the range of each other.

Originally, in the first lighthouse, they had parabolic reflectors.

They had 13 of 'em around the top of our lighthouse.

- And the government would only spend enough money to light like four or five of them.

That was part of the reason the light wasn't very effective was because the lighting just wasn't very good.

They didn't have Fresnel lenses then.

It was a much more primitive form of lighting that they had.

- In 1919, the Fresnel lens was put in this lighthouse.

It's made of brass and it has glass prisms in it that would reflect the light out into the lake, and it would go about 15 miles.

- This is the lens that Augustin Fresnel came up with.

It's a series of prisms that are set up in a circle and they let the light through, but they bend the rays, so they all focus actually outside the lens.

You have an internal light then, that was a weakness because in order to keep this burning brightly, you needed a special type oil, which turned out to be whale oil.

The Vermilion Lighthouse is 34 feet tall, and you can see 7.7 miles to the horizon.

Some of the bigger lighthouses, obviously, you can see a lot further.

Now, these Fresnel lenses, they can get very large.

You can see then how the structure of a lighthouse that is built up has to be pretty substantial if you're going to raise something that weighs six, seven ton up to the top of it.

- Our lighthouse is pretty unique.

It has two lighthouses.

In 1822 when it was first lit, it was 55 foot high.

At 55 feet, it only went out about nine miles.

Ships were getting bigger and they needed deeper water, so the light had to be extended out.

So they took nine foot of the stone out and built the cylindrical chimney, extending the building by another 15 feet, and then put another lighthouse in the middle, made of brick, all the way up from the ground and put the cast iron stairs in, the spiral stairs that you go up, 77 steps.

The weight of the next lens is 1400 pounds.

They didn't believe that the structure of the limestone tower would be sufficient, so they took the brick chimney up another seven feet in 1903.

So we have two lighthouses, that's pretty interesting.

The lens behind me is the original lens that was removed, actually installed in 1903.

It's a three and a half order, 48 inch diameter, 1400 pound Fresnel lens.

And the Fresnel lens also has, behind it, a clock, and the clock was used to turn the Fresnel lens.

- With this lighthouse on the pier, it was always a fixed red light placed inside this fifth order Fresnel lens, and people say, "Why is it so small and Marblehead is so big?"

Well, Marblehead is a coastal light, so it's got to guide ships up and down the lake, and so you want that sucker to be seen 15, 20 miles away.

And Port Clinton only needed to be seen about eight miles away, so it was tall enough to do the job, and it did that job from 1896 to 1952.

- Well, they wanted to make the lighthouses flash, and they could make 'em flash at different times and patterns, and that way you could tell what lighthouse you were looking at.

They originally used what they called chariot wheels.

They were just big steel wheels that would turn the lens.

The lens would turn, but it would turn very slow, so they were limited as to how fast they could make the flashes go.

Somebody had the idea that, well, let's put a little channel in here and put mercury in it, and then the lens can float on mercury, and boy, now you can make it go really fast.

So the Toledo Lighthouse was one of the first ones where instead of that channel where the mercury went, they actually put ball bearings, so that lens also was considered modern.

And the other unique thing about the lens is it's a combination of the different styles.

Some lenses, they call 'em clamshell lenses, where there's just one great big clamshell side with the bullseye in the middle of it.

And then the other side is the duplicate.

As it rotates, it's got two flashes.

Well, this lighthouse, they wanted it to make three flashes, two white and a red with 10 seconds between each flash.

So what they did, they took a clamshell on one side, and behind it was two beehive type lenses, which is what you usually see in most lighthouses.

The only way they could make the red flash was with a ruby red piece of glass.

Whenever that flashed, it was maybe only 75% as bright as the white lights.

That was the way they compensated for it in those days by making that big clamshell on that side that made them so they looked like they were equal flashes, two bright whites and one bright red.

- The job of the Coast Guard or back then, was the lighthouse keepers, they must keep the light lit at all times, make sure the foghorns worked.

They give aids to navigation if there was an accident out in the lake or a boater in distress, they would give their location and also, give out weather reports to the Coast Guard.

And they did that by either radio or there was a phone system that came out here in later years.

- If you go back to the Revenue Cutter Service formed at the beginning of our country in the 1790s, schooners would go up and down the East Coast to make sure all the tariffs were being paid.

As a result, they would run into people that were in trouble, and so they would help 'em out.

And it wasn't until the 1870s that the government actually paid some money to build lifesaving stations.

If you look in the life saving long books, every day, they would keep track of how many boats went by.

- We were fortunate to have a lifesaving station where the Coast Guard is right now.

It housed about seven men on the second floor, and their whole job was to risk their lives every day, to save people coming off these ships.

Over that 44 year period of time, the lifesaving service and the surfmen interacted with about 27,000 ships and pulled 170,000 people out of harm's way.

- In the year 1915, the Revenue Cutter Service and the US Lifesaving Service combined to form the Coast Guard.

So the Coast Guard was not called the Coast Guard until 1915.

And then as that progressed, in 1939, the Coast Guard took over the lighthouse service.

So over the years, the Coast Guard has took charge of all the lighthouses and taken on more responsibilities.

- They lived in here six days a week.

They would come out and it was on a rotating basis.

But when you were out here for your six days and eight hour shifts, you had to stay here on your day off.

You would either watch TV, listen to the radio, make puzzles, or play solitaire or fish, but they could not leave until their tour was up at the lighthouse.

- You had to be fairly antisocial to be a lighthouse keeper, you had to be okay being alone and just with your family.

This is the first story, the first lighthouse keeper, Benajah Wolcott started in 1822.

He lit the light in June, the first time it was ever lit, and he lived here with his wife in the summer.

Their families had to deal with the isolation just like everyone else.

He was a pretty righteous man, and one of the odd things that happened, if you were bringing a ship into Sandusky and someone on the ship had cholera and died, you couldn't take the ship in or they wouldn't let you unload, so they actually threw the bodies over.

That happened several times according to legend.

Sure enough, Benajah and his son got the bodies, gave them a Christian burial.

He died of cholera, and so did his son, and they're buried at the keeper's house.

The interesting part is the government couldn't find a suitable male lighthouse keeper.

His wife, Rachel, became the first female lighthouse keeper of the Great Lakes, and she stayed on for quite a while.

So she had to make sure that light was lit and be up there every four hours.

She had to do all the duties that he did.

- The lighthouse keeper had to be kind of a jack of all trades, doing a lot of different things here at the lighthouse.

But the main job, of course, was to keep the light lit and the light would be lit, usually up until December 15th.

- You know, if you look at the Great Lakes, lighthouses were an important way that we, over time, reduce the number of shipwrecks.

- It seems like there's so much history that's just gone.

The younger generations don't have any idea, like for example, like these keepers, what they went through just to keep a light burning.

They actually had quite a bit of work to do.

It was a rough life.

- The last real lighthouse keeper served in 1926, so that was the year that they automated the light.

So instead of having an oil lamp powered by kerosene, they ran a cable out to the lighthouse and they installed 150 watt light bulb, but they still needed somebody to make sure the lens was cleaned, and so they hired a part-time guy.

He was in charge of that duty from 1926 until the lighthouse was deactivated in 1952.

- It was 1965, during the Palm Sunday tornado that hit Toledo.

This gentleman, he said he was 19 years old.

It was his first assignment in the Coast Guard, and him and the boatswain in charge, they were the only ones out on the lighthouse that day.

They knew it was storming and everything, and he was off duty, so he went up to his room on the second floor, went to bed.

His clothes were all folded up on the floor, and he had his boots there next to him.

He said he had just got up up in bed and looked out the window, 'cause the window was right above his bunk.

He could see that it was really bad weather, and he laid back down and then pretty soon, boom, he says the window that was over him blew out over him.

That window blew in.

The other window on the other side, blew out completely, and he said he couldn't find his clothes.

Their log book that was downstairs ended up being in the second floor.

He had his boots there, and he was in his underwear, so he put his boots on, he said, so we went, come down, and he's standing there on the staircase and the other guy was down there on the bottom.

He says, "I was afraid to come up there.

I thought you got killed."

The tornado hit the lighthouse and oh, it did a lot of damage.

You know, they patched it up for the rest of the season, I guess.

But then the following year, they automated it.

In 1966, I think it was June or July, would've been the last time that a keeper was actually at the lighthouse.

- As navigation became more prominent with satellites and maps, lighthouses started becoming not that important anymore.

The Coast Guard took 'em over.

So for 30 some years, they kept all these lighthouses up.

They were in charge of the maintenance, they were in charge of everything.

Now you're in 1990s, there are better navigational devices out there.

There's buoys, there's satellites, there's all types of radio navigation.

This lighthouse was going to be destroyed because it was just surplus.

They wanted to just put a tower with a blinking light on it.

- One of the reasons I bought this lighthouse was to save it.

There are no more lighthouses being built.

The only lighthouses are the lighthouses that we still have, and it is so critical that we save these lighthouses.

You have to keep finding people who are as passionate about saving these buildings as you are to do the work.

- I did not believe that we would get this far 'cause when we opened that door, this place was a total disaster.

We shook our heads and said, "Hmm, I don't know," but we took it on.

- Great Lakes history takes that to a new level because there's just so many aspects of Great Lakes history, whether it's lighthouses, whether it's lifesaving, whether it's commercial shipping or commercial fishing.

So many different topics that you can find on the Great Lakes, and that makes it constantly reinventing itself.

Our goal is always to spread awareness of the majesty of Great Lake's history.

- Even though there will never really be another lighthouse built, there is a very strong movement around to preserve what we've got, and that is why a lot of these are never going to die.

They're always going to be useful to the population as a whole.

They're good things to have around.

(gentle music) - When the lighthouses became available from the government, I started looking in terms of finding a summer home.

- Our lighthouse is the last remaining freestanding wooden pier light on Lake Erie - The day the lighthouse was officially lit, that will be in our hearts forever.

- Frequently, when you're here, and you might be the only one here, you do hear different noises and you're not sure where they come from.

Who knows?

(soft music)