When most of us picture a lighthouse, we imagine a rocky Atlantic coastline. Crashing waves, salty spray, maybe a fishing village in New England. So it's natural to assume the state with the most lighthouses must sit on the ocean. It doesn't.
The answer is Michigan. The Great Lakes State has about 150 lighthouses, the most of any state in the country. Counting past and present lights, it has over 150. Of the roughly thousand lights the United States has had over the years, a big share were built to guide ships around Michigan's enormous freshwater shores.
A Coastline Like No Other
Michigan is made of two peninsulas surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes. Its shoreline runs about 3,288 miles, the second longest of any state, including more than 1,000 miles of island shoreline. No spot in the state is more than 85 miles from a Great Lakes shore. The coast is also deeply indented with big bays, such as Grand Traverse Bay and Saginaw Bay in the Lower Peninsula and Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior.
Those lakes were highways for passenger ships and freighters. Michigan's first lighthouses went up between 1818 and 1822. They shone at night and served as landmarks during the day, helping vessels travel safely along the busy shipping lanes of the Great Lakes.
A Lighthouse Building Boom
The 1800s brought a rush of construction across the Great Lakes. Between 1852 and 1860 alone, 26 new lights were built. Even the Civil War only slowed things down. In the 1870s, 43 more were added, and the 1880s saw more than one hundred lights built across the Lakes.
By the start of the 20th century, the government's Lighthouse Board was running 334 major lights, 67 fog horns, and 563 buoys on the Great Lakes. Designs changed over time, too. Early lights often sat on top of the keeper's house. Later came tall brick towers, often 80 to 100 feet high, and eventually steel towers.
The Graveyard of the Great Lakes
The lakes may be fresh water, but they can be deadly. On Lake Superior, the stretch near Whitefish Point is known as the "Graveyard of the Great Lakes" because of its many shipwrecks, including the famous SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Whitefish Point Light was first lit in 1849, making it the oldest active light on Lake Superior. Every ship entering or leaving the lake passes near it. Its current iron tower dates to 1861, a Civil War relic that's still working. Today it's part of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, which displays the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
A Barber Pole on the Water
Some of Michigan's lighthouses are real head-turners. The White Shoal Light, about 20 miles west of the Mackinac Bridge in Lake Michigan, is the tallest lighthouse on the Great Lakes. It's painted with diagonal red and white stripes, sometimes called a candy cane pattern, making it the only "barber pole" lighthouse in the United States. Another, Mission Point Light near Traverse City, sits along the 45th parallel, the line halfway between the equator and the North Pole.
Many Michigan lighthouses welcome visitors, and some even have museums. So if you're looking for a road trip, skip the ocean and head to the Great Lakes. You'll find more lighthouses there than anywhere else in America.
