Linda Osborne Cynowa

Lighthouses of Washington

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for June 3, 2024

There are eighteen active lighthouses on the Washington coast line, three are standing but considered inactive, three have become automated towers, and two have been demolished. On September 16, Arcadia will publish ‘Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast’ the third in a series of four vintage postcard lighthouse books and here I hope to bring you a taste of what the state of Washington has to offer with three examples below.

Cape Flattery Lighthouse, in Neah Bay. The lighthouse was built on Tatoosh Island in 1857 in the northwestern point of the United States, as a navigational aid to mariners entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Because of thick fog and especially the strong currants ships could be carried toward the dangerous shores of Vancouver Island. Placing the light on Tatoosh Island allowed marine shipping to enter the strait at night. Tatoosh Island is a 20-acre rock ledge lying one-half mile off Cape Flattery. Because of its height from the water, being 100 feet, landing ships for restocking was a hazardous undertaking. A one-and-a-half story, Cape Cod style sandstone dwelling was built with two-foot-thick walls. The main floor consisted of a dining room, kitchen and living room. Four bedrooms were in the upper story. A 65-foot brick lighthouse tower was built in the center of the building. The first-order Fresnel lens, had a fixed white light with a visibility of 20 miles. In 1883 the telegraph was brought to the island by the longest cable hung, that stretched from the island to the mainland. In 1904 that cable went underground. 1932 had the first-order lens being downgraded to a fourth-order. By 1977 the lighthouse automated.

Ediz Hook Lighthouse, Port Angeles. With Port Angeles, the northwests deepest harbor, is a three-and-a-half-mile long sand spit, an accumulation of sand usually attached to land at one end, and called it Ediz Hook. President Lincoln n 1862 signed an order that the end of the spit be used for governmental purposes. In 1865 the original two-story school-house design lighthouse was constructed with a square tower at the end of the pitched roof. In 1885 a fifteen-foot fog bell tower was built with a one-and-a-half-ton bell that hung from the top beams of the structure. Using a clock mechanism, every fifteen seconds during foggy weather the bell would ring. The years would see changes to the fog bell to make the sound more effective. In 1908 a new a fog signal building with an attached octagonal light tower and a separate keepers dwelling was built at the station. The fifth-order Fresnel lens was removed from the old tower and placed in the new tower. A beacon was used to replace the second lighthouse, placed at a Coast Guard Air Station in 1946. The 1908 lighthouse became a private dwelling after being removed from the station area. The original 1865 light was demolished in 1939. This second lighthouse was destined to last only about forty years, when it was replaced by a modern beacon at the coast Guard Station in Port Angeles. The 1908 light was sold for use as a private residence after being removed by barge across the harbor.

North Head Lighthouse, Port Angeles. At the mouth of the Columbia River channel, mariners found that the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse was often obscured when approaching the river. Concern was great because of the many ship wrecks, along the peninsula. In 1898 the light was first lit with a fixed-white light, while Cape Disappointment Light, just two miles north would use an alternating light of red and white flashes. The new lighthouse on Cape Disappointment would be called North Head Lighthouse. The light was constructed of brick on a sandstone foundation, then using a cement plaster overlay. A 65-foot- tower with lantern room and a first-order Fresnel lens was brought from Cape Disappointment. Soon a keepers residence, two oil houses, barn, and duplex housing for the assistance keepers, would round out the light station. Being a light keeper at North Head Light meant getting used to a very remote and hard life. It helped when there were three keepers in residence to have work schedules of 8 hours at a shift. Usually one keeper worked from dusk till dawn, then others did the maintenance during the daylight hours to keep it in top working order. In 1937 the first-order lens, is changed for a forth-order lens, by this time electricity has been brought to the light station. Because of this being one of the windiest spots in the United States, for a short time a US Weather Bureau was built at the station, but would eventually close by 1955. The light was automated in 1961 and at that time the last light keeper would leave. The lighthouse was transferred to the Keepers of North Head Lighthouse group in 2012 for restoration purposes. North Head has remained the light station with all it’s original buildings still untacked.

On that ‘wee note’ till next month, Monday July 1st, 2024.

All post card images used are from the author’s collection.

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Lighthouses of Oregon

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for May 6, 2024

There are eleven lighthouses on the Oregon Coast and nine of them are on the National Register of Historic Places, along the 363 miles of that Oregon Coast. This summer Arcadia will publish ‘Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast’ the third in a series of four vintage postcard lighthouse books and I hope to bring you a taste of what Oregon has to offer with three examples below.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse (Cape Foulweather), Newport. The 93 foot tall tower, is the tallest lighthouse tower on the Oregon coast, it was built with bricks from a California brick company. It has been said that over 370,000 bricks were used to complete the project. They used a double wall when building the tower to keep out the dampness and make it more insulated. The tower light shines 162 feet above the water and has a visibility of nineteen miles, with its first-order Fresnel lens by Barbier & Fenestre. By 1872 the keepers residence was built as a two story duplex, with the keeper residing in on one side and the assistant keepers sharing the other side. Maintance and storage buildings were added as needed for use with the three light keepers on duty. By 1920 additional housing was built at the light station.

Yaquina Head, Cape Foulweather Lighthouse, Oregon

Coquille River Lighthouse, Brandon. Originally called the Brandon Light, and because of the shifting sandbars in the Coquille River and the Brandon Harbor had such dangerous area for the marine traffic, a light was soon necessary and started in 1895. Before the light could be started, a leveling of the rocky ground was needed on Rockliff Rock, where stone was cut for the foundation. A cylindrical tower was attached to the octagonal signal equipment room on the east side of the building. A keepers duplex, with three bedrooms, dining room with kitchen and a sitting room, was attached to the tower by a wooden walkway, running 650 feet in length. In 1936 an out of control forest fire swept into the town of Brandon and burn all but sixteen of the towns many hundreds of buildings. With most of the town gone, shipping to the area declined. By 1939 at the south jetty an automatic light was erected and the Coquille River light was shut down. In 1939 the Coast Guard felt the lighthouse was no long needed, and was abandoned and soon in need of major repair.

Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, Clatsop County. Located just over a mile from Tillamook Head in the Pacific Ocean and 20 miles south of the Columbia River, the lighthouse sits atop an acre of volcanic rock. At times called ‘Terrible Tilly’ because of the terrible weather conditions, isolation, and continuing environmental hazards for all that worked there. Supply’s could be delayed for days or even weeks. Workers would have to dynamite the rocks rounded areas to flatten a portion to hold the lighthouse. Soon a one-story stone dwelling, forty-eight by forty-five-feet with a sixty-two foot tall tower and thirty-two by twenty-eight-foot lantern room with a first-order Fresnel lens. After working for 575 days for the building to take place, the light was first lite in January of 1881. In the following year, on the northeast slope of the rock, a brick engine and supply house was built. A landing wharf was needed and attached to the keepers dwellings along with a tramway to help raising supplies from the wharf to the supply house. There would always be continual repairs to be made to the light and surrounding buildings because of water and storm damage. Tillamook Rock Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1957, with a history of being the most expensive lighthouse to operate.

All images used are from the author’s collection. On that ‘wee note’ till next month, Monday June 3rd, 2024.

The Scotch Cap Lighthouse, April Fool’s Day 1946

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for April 1st, 2024

On an April Fools Day, 78 years ago on Unimak Island, in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska the unthinkable would happen. At 1:30 am a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the North Pacific, at a location roughly 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. The earthquake created a tsunami that quickly traveled north to the Aleutian Islands and then south, where, five hours later, it would hit Hawaii. The Scotch Cap Lighthouse were a series of lighthouses on the southwest corner of Unimak Island.

1903 light with keepers Michael Ludescher and Sigvart Olsen, circa 1910

The original lighthouse built in 1903 was a 45-foot wood tower on an octagonal wooden building. The light and it’s keepers would see many ship wrecks over the next few years, as in 1909 when a supply ship and it’s 194 crew members were guests of the light station for two weeks after the their ship the Columbia was wrecked. It would be two weeks before they could be removed from the station. The 1903 original Scotch Cap light, seen below, would be replaced in 1940, by a concrete reinforced lighthouse and fog signal building, built next to this original light.

On that April Fool’s Day in 1946, the nervous watch keeper noted the event of the trembling, in the log book, and that it ‘lasted but a minute’. Keeping in contact with the watch man at the light at the foot of the headland, by radio telephone. But 70 miles out in the Pacific a massive segment of the wall of the Aleutian Trench collapsed and fell to the sea bottom, 20,000 feet below the surface. This would create a series of seismic waves or known as a tsunamis, racing across the Pacific.

Within minutes a second tremor, shorter but much sharper rocked the Scotch Cap light, and again no damage occurred. Twenty minutes later the first tsunami approached Scotch Cap. As the wave moved into shallow water near the shore, it formed into a near vertical wall of water estimated to be roughly 100 feet high. Millions of tons of water exploded as the water engulfed the headland, destroying everything in its path. The off watch crew station rushed out of their quarters, were they were ordered to get to higher ground, knowing there would be further waves coming in. As they rushed to leave the building, one looked toward the sea and cried out, “the light, the Scotch Cap Light! It’s gone out.”

Not only had the light gone out but the fog signal and radio beacon were quiet. All attempts to raise the station by radio failed. The commanding officer high on the cliffs looked over the edge and found nothing but blackness. When daylight appeared the Coast Guardsmen made their way to the cliff edge and peered down. All that they saw that morning was the concrete platform and some broken pieces of concrete, all that remained of the Scotch Cap Light Station.

Scotch Cap Light and Coast Guard housing before the 1940 concrete light was added.

That morning the teletype machines sent out a message: “TIDAL WAVE PRECEDED BY EARTHQUAKE COMPLETELY DESTROYED SCOTCH CAP LIGHT STATION WITH LOSS OF ALL HANDS STOP TOP OF WAVE STRUCK THIS UNIT CAUSING EXTENSIVE DAMAGE BUT WITH NO LOSS OF LIFE STOP ENGINE ROOM FLOODED BUT EXPECT TO MAINTAIN EMERGENCY POWER IF NO FURTHER DAMAGE IS EXPERIENCED STOP WILL SEARCH FOR BODIES OF SCOTCH CAP PERSONNEL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP REQUEST INSTRUCTIONS STOP”

The search for the five Coast Guard keepers found nothing, everything was gone. The five men would be found when the sea gave up their bodies five days later. The five men, Jack Colvin, Dewey Dykstra, Antony Pettit, Leonard Pickering and Paul Ness were identified only by dental records.

The wooden lighthouse and the concrete lighthouse.

Ghost stories are not unknown around lighthouses, and after the April Fool’s Day disaster Scotch Cap joined the ranks of the haunted lighthouses. One night, both the generators broke down. Without power, there was no light and the foghorn was silent. A ‘Notice to Mariners’ went out on Coast Guard radio alerting the ships and aircraft. A Coast Guard cutter cruising within sight of Scotch Cap, raised the station asking why had the station sent out the warning? The cutter reported the the light was in view and burning brightly. The people who knew Scotch Cap, those of the old timers, just exchanged knowing glances.

All postcards used are from the authors collection, with the exception of the last image showing the concrete and wooden lighthouses, were I give my great appreciation to the ‘Keepers Log’ Winter 1986 for their excellent information and account on the disaster that struck the Scotch Cap in 1946.

From Arcadia Publishing of ‘Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast’, due to be published in mid summer 2024.

‘The Narrows’ Halifax 1917

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for March 4th, 2024

After steaming out of New York City on December 1, 1917, filled with a staggering three thousand tons of TNT, benzene and gun cotton, this munitions ship the Mont-Blanc found its way up the Atlantic coast, through waters filled with enemy u-boats. After colliding with another ship the Norwegian Imo, chartered to the Belgian Relief Commission, while approaching the ‘narrows’, where the smallest portion of the harbor sits in the port city of Halifax, the Mont-Blanc’s cargo erupted with the force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. Not until the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the mid 1940’s would the world see such an explosion. The blast vaporized in one-fifteenth of a second the 3,121-ton hull of the Mont-Blanc. The blast cloud shot up more than two thousand feet in the air. Then the thirty-five foot tsunami, triggered by the explosion, swept along the water-front, washing victims out to sea and pushing ships in the harbor on to the shore. Here is the story of a remarkable survival for the people of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

At the top of the postcard above, is ‘the narrows’ where the harbor has narrowed greatly in this large port harbor, this card showing a portion of the harbor before the explosion. Halifax’s inner harbor had become a safe harbor for merchant convoys leaving for Britain or France during World War l, both Halifax and across the harbor in Dartmouth were usually filled with merchant traffic because of the war. Approximately 60 to 65 thousand people lived and worked in the Halifax Dartmouth area. Anti-submarine nets were pulled in place every evening and opened again every morning.

When the Mont-Blanc reached Halifax harbor, she arrived too late to make it into the harbor before the submarine nets had already been raised on December 5th. The Norwegian ship Imo, had been stuck inside the basin for the past few days and anxious to leave. When the nets were removed in the morning of the 6th, both ships in their haste, would ultimately collide, setting of a chain of events, previously unknown. At 8:45 in the morning the collision occurred. The damage to the Mont-Blanc was slight, but barrels of benzene on the deck fell over and opened, just waiting for a spark to set them off. Many of the ships in the harbor, not knowing what the cargo was on the Mont-Blanc, came to give assistance. All the while the ship was slowly moving closer to the pier.

With the lay out of the harbor many homes would face the water on streets that ran along the harbor on the rows of hills above it. People were on their way to work and children were on their way to school that early morning. But nothing could be more interesting than getting as close to the harbor as possible to see what they soon realize was a burning ship coming in close to the pier. Little realizing what was on the ship.

When the blast occurred, over 1,600 people were killed instantly, with 300 to perish shortly after and over 9000 people ultimately were injured. Every building within an almost 2 mile radius was destroyed. Hundreds of people watching the burning ship out the windows of their homes were blinded when the blast wave shattered windows they had been watching from. Stoves in homes that over turned created major fires throughout Halifax. It was believed had it not been for a railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent Coleman operating near Pier 6 sent a telegraph message to the incoming train to stop where they were. “Hold up the train. Ammunition ship on fire in harbor, making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good by boys”. From there all incoming trains were halted coming into Halifax. Vince Colman died at his post while saving others.

Despite a raging snow storm that fell on the first night, relief efforts began immediately and hospitals filled up quickly. Soon recuse trains would arrive bringing help and supply’s from all over Canada and northeastern United States. Doctors and nurses from Boston, and especially eye doctors found their way to the where the help was needed most. Approximately 5,900 eye injuries were found, with many permanently debilitating, from the flying glass after the explosion, because of the thousands of people who stopped to watch the burning ship from both inside buildings and from outside.

Because of the help and monetary support that Boston’s Red Cross sent to Halifax, during Christmas 1918 the residents of Halifax sent to the City of Boston a Christmas tree. The official Boston Christmas tree that sits on Boston Commons is sent from the people of Halifax as an on going thank you. A portion of the Mont-Blanc anchor was found 2.5 miles from the harbor, today sits as a reminder of those devastating days in the winter of 1917. I came across this story when researching the books I have worked on, never having heard about this while in school, being that it took place in Canada and not part of our history. But I found it history worth noting. I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada in August 2022 and found a beautiful city, with no remains of the explosion obviously after all these years, but saw that there are many areas where the people of Halifax have remembered this dark days with memorials and especially with the sound of bells.

On that ‘wee note’ till next month, Monday April 1, 2024.

Research material curtesy of: ‘The Great Halifax Explosion’ by John U. Bacon, 2017 Harper Collins. ‘Curse of the Narrows’ by Laura M MacDonald, 2005, Walker Publishing Company. ‘Explosion in Halifax Harbor’ by David B Flemming, 2004 Formac Publishing Company. There is so much more to this story than I have been able to write about and these wonderful books give a complete story to this important disaster. Postcards are from authors collection.

“Loneliness and Monotony”

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for February 5, 2024

The words most used by light keepers in their diaries and letters to describe the existence during their time at lighthouses are “loneliness” and “monotony”. A great deal of a keeper’s life centered on the mundane duties of keeping the station and its equipment clean. Lighthouses were by necessity placed in areas of danger and were in isolated regions. Solitude was part of position. Before the advent of electricity, the lighting device was a lamp. Fuel for illumination ranged from whale oil, lard oil, rapeseed oil, and petroleum products. The wick of the lamp had to be carefully trimmed to produce a strong light and watched constantly throughout the night. This constant attention to wicks led to lighthouse keepers earning the nickname “wickies.’

Just two examples of isolated lighthouses on the Pacific coast, would be the St George Lighthouse in California and Tillamook Lighthouse in Oregon. The foundation of St. George Reef Light is a pier in an irregular oval shape, 86 feet in diameter, faced with cut granite and filled with concrete. The tower is also constructed of granite with the smallest block weighing 17 tons. The light stands 144 feet above sea level and was first lit on October 20, 1892. In total, it took an incredible ten long years to successfully complete the project, yet after 97 years St. George Reef Light still stands today. Getting supplies and especially families, out to the light, when they wanted to come or visit was very dangerous. Some of the families lived back on the mainland and their spouses would work three weeks on and a full week off, as an example.

It is noted that lighthouses going back to the 1800’s “at one time or another had female assistant keepers; and a surprising number had women as principal keepers.” This was not, because of an enlightened view on the part of the service. Rather, it was a means of saving money. It was not unusual to have a husband and wife team at a station. Both wives and children helped in running the light. For example, Mary Israel raised four children while assisting her husband at the Old Point
Lorna Light, near San Diego. Juliet Fish, keeper of the Angel Island station, in San Francisco Bay, once manually pounded a fog bell for twenty hours straight when the mechanical striker failed.

Floating Lightships in the form of cutters were used extensively, keeping the men out at sea for extended periods of time. One such time, as in the case of the Golden Gate, the 110 foot cutter built in Seattle in 1896 and arriving in San Francisco on May 13, 1897. The Golden Cate performed law enforcement boardings, towing, helped fumigate vessels, and resupplying in the Bay area. One of her most unusual duties came during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. A great deal of the city’s destruction was caused by fires. The men that served on the Golden Gate cutter served as firefighters and transporting officials and refugees. Then, in the middle of their work, the commanding officer of the cutter was given the added responsibility of taking on board the gold reserve from the Federal Bank in San Francisco. The cutter remained a floating bank until the fire danger was over.

On that ‘wee note’ till next month, Monday March 4, 2024.

Courtesy of the United States Coast Guard in the Southwest Pacific, postcard images part of the authors collection.