Though George McDougall was listed as keeper, due to gout and other infirmities, he was forced to employ a helper to look after the light. The total cost of the new structures came to $5,001.48, and the remainder of the appropriation was carried to the surplus fund. Located north of the original tower, the second Fort Gratiot Lighthouse was built of brick and stood sixty-nine feet tall. The lighthouse was undermined, and before repairs could be made, it toppled over in November.Ĭongress appropriated $8,000 on Mafor a new lighthouse, and a $4,445 contract for a tower and dwelling was awarded to Lucius Lyon, who later served as one of Michigan’s first senators. The following September, a great storm blew with tremendous fury for three days and nights and eroded vast amounts of the shore. Once in the lantern room, there was barely space for McDougall “to walk around the lamps without rubbing.” The lighthouse was reportedly not only poorly built but poorly located, being too far south for boats on Lake Huron to see it.ĭuring the summer of 1828, Keeper McDougall reported that the lighthouse had cracks in its walls and was leaning to the east. Then, after ascending a nearly perpendicular ladder, there was an eighteen by twenty-one-and-a-quarter-inch trap door through which, “with very great difficulty,” McDougall had to squeeze. “I find the third stairs in going up in some places so steep as to compel me to force up sideways,” McDougall complained. Keeper McDougall wasted no time in writing William Woodbridge, Customs Collector at Detroit, concerning the tower’s deficiencies. McDougall had practiced law in Detroit for several years before his political friends obtained the position of keeper for him. Desnoyers were employed until George McDougall arrived in December to take charge of the lighthouse, which was the first built in Michigan. Temporary keepers Rufus Hatch and Jean B.
A conical, thirty-two-foot-tall tower, outfitted with an array of lamps and reflectors, was completed in August 1825 at a cost of $5,762.83.
Winslow Lewis was awarded the contract for constructing the lighthouse, but he subcontracted the work to Daniel Warren of Rochester, New York. Lighthouse, dwelling, and fog signal in 1873 On March 3, 1823, Congress provided $3,500 for the Secretary of the Treasury to have a lighthouse built near Fort Gratiot in Michigan Territory and added another $5,000 to this amount on April 2, 1824.
Clair River and is named after Charles Gratiot, the engineer that supervised its construction. Fort Gratiot, a stockade fort, was built in 1814 to guard the juncture of Lake Huron and St. Lighthouses and forts are often neighbors as important waterways needed to be clearly marked and well defended.
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