5 Historic Great Lakes Lighthouses For Sale In Michigan

Americans have long had a rapt fascination with the lighthouses dotting coasts and harbors, now relics in many cases. With the advent of GPS and other navigational apparatuses to guide the way for seafarers and warn them rocks, reefs, shoals and hazards as they leave the lake or ocean and head to the port, many have been decommissioned and stand sentry over America’s maritime history. The government is unloading others, including five on the Great Lakes in Michigan.

Bids start at $10,000 and $15,000 for the wave-washed lighthouses. Those acquired in previous government auctions — or outright giveaways of properties that don’t attract buyers to preservationists who agree to maintain them — have been turned into private getaways, vacation rentals, and museums and cultural venues.

All but one of the Great Lakes beacons, the Detroit River Lighthouse near Monroe in southeast Michigan, are located in northern Michigan, and all have storied pasts.

For interested buyers, bidding details are found under the real estate tab on the U.S. General Services Administration’s auction website. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, and click here to find your local Michigan Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Before the Detroit River Lighthouse was installed in 1873 just south of where the Detroit River empties into Lake Erie, “many vessels, especially in heavy weather, turning too soon, come to grief on Bar Point Shoal,” according to a history on lighthousefriends.com. The U.S. Coast Guard said it was unneeded in 2015.

Like the Detroit Patch Facebook page; story continues below.

The lighthouse, a 55-foot tall white conical tower with black topping on a hexagonal concrete crib, is located to miles east of the Pointe Mouillee State Game Area. The starting bid is $10,000.

When the Lansing Shoal Lighthouse went into operation in 1928, it was a welcomed by the crew of the lightship that had marked the treacherous passage 11 miles north of Beaver Island along the Straits of Mackinac. The ship had been struck twice by passing ships during thick, daytime fog the previous summer.

The lighthouse survived one of the worst storms ever recorded on Lake Michigan on Nov. 11, 1940. Sixty-six sailors aboard five vessels perished in the fierce storm, where winds topping 100 mph stirred up ountainous waves” that broke out the porthole windows on the basement of the lighthouse. Water rushed in, flooding the mechanical area and taking the lighthouse temporarily out of commission for repairs.

After an earlier storm in December 1929, the crew was trapped inside for three days after wind-tossed lake spray encrusted the lighthouse with ice that blocked all of the exits. An automated light was added, and during the rest of its useful life, the lighthouse wasn’t manned in harsh winter months.

Skies were clear and there was no fog on Sept. 9, 1993, when the 1,000-foot steamer the “Indiana Harbor” plowed full speed into the lighthouse, ripping open a 50-square-foot hole that required more than $1.9 million in repairs, apparently due to inattentiveness by the crew of the freighter’s pilothouse.

Bidding for this lighthouse starts at $15,000.

On June 3, 1898, the wooden steamship “Minneapolis” crashed into unmarked shoal along the northern coast of Lake Michigan about six miles south of Peninsula Point, near Escanaba. It would be decades before the Minneapolis Shoal Lighthouse would be built, according to lighthousefriends.com. It didn’t begin operating until 1930.

The light has withstood battering 40 mph winds and 20-foot waves, but one of the greatest tests of its integrity came in April 1948. Lighthouse keeper Anton Jessen and his assistants tried to open it for the season, finding it surrounded by three feet of ice. It took about three days to thaw the ice, during which time fierce winds pushed the huge ice chunks around the bay, according to the lighthousefriends.com account.

“When the ice first struck you could feel the lighthouse quiver on its foundation,” Jessen said. “Then it built up a barrier on the shoal and some of the force was absorbed. But the ice piled higher and higher, up to 45 feet high, so that we couldn’t see out of the windows in the living quarters.”

Bidding for this lighthouse starts at $15,000.

The Poe Reef Lighthouse near Cheboygan was an important guidepost for mariners trying to make it through the fog. In 1929, it became the first in the United States to be equipped with synchronized radio beacons and fog signals. When the radio and sound signals were sent simultaneously, mariners could calculate the vessel’s distance from the lighthouse — and a dangerous shoal reef just 12 feet under water.

Bidding for the Poe Reef Lighthouse starts at $10,000.

The Fourteen Foot Shoal Lighthouse, located on Lake Huron about a mile northwest of Cheboygan Point near the entry to Cheboygan Harbor, went into service in 1930. It was designed to be radio controlled from Poe Reef Lighthouse, but an observer was stationed there until the system could be fully proven, which occurred five years later.

“Up until the opening of navigation in 1935 a single keeper was retained at the Fourteen Foot Shoal Station, his duties being merely to observe the operation of the equipment and keep up the station, having nothing whatever to do with its functioning,” lighthousefriends.com explained. “As a matter of fact, extreme precautions were taken to make sure that there was no hand manipulation of apparatus, the controls being all kept under lock.”

Bidding for the Fourteen Foot Shoal Lighthouse starts at $15,000.

Main photo of the Detroit River Lighthouse near Monroe courtesy of U.S. Lighthouse Society