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Au Sable Light Station

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1873–1874; 1909 lightkeeper's house; 1996 restoration. Au Sable Point, 12 miles west of Grand Marais in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
  • Au Sable Light Station (HABS, Jeff Bostetter, inked by Hugh Hughes)

A light tower, two dwellings, fog signal house, and boathouse make up the Au Sable Light Station complex. Twenty-two years after the opening of the Sault Locks, the U.S. Coast Guard built the station at Au Sable Point to aid shipping of lumber, coal, grain, copper, and iron. The tower is linked by a passageway to a red brick double house with a jerkinhead, gabled roof. The red brick, seven-room keeper's dwelling stands to the west. The boathouse was built by 1910. The National Park Service has restored the light station. In 1996 the park service reinstalled the original third-order Fresnel lens in the lens room atop the tower. Crews of lakeshore maintenance employees and volunteers are returning the landscape to its 1910 appearance by trimming trees and pushing their brush over the edge of the sand bank to reduce erosion, planting native seedlings, and repairing sidewalks.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Kathryn Bishop Eckert
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Data

What's Nearby

Pickle Barrel House Museum (Teenie Weenie Pickle Barrel Cottage)

Citation

Kathryn Bishop Eckert, "Au Sable Light Station", [, Michigan], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MI-01-AR6.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Michigan

Buildings of Michigan, Kathryn Bishop Eckert. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, 534-534.

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