A brick, one-and-a-half-story keeper’s dwelling was also built in 1858 along with a storeroom located between the tower and dwelling. The tower’s ten-sided lantern room housed a fifth-order Fresnel lens that produced a flash of white light every ninety seconds. This cylindrical structure had a diameter of eight feet, stood fifty feet tall, and was constructed with an outer wall with a thickness of roughly a foot-and-a-half and an inner wall that was eight inches thick. The bricks used in the 1848 tower were too soft, and a replacement tower had to be built in 1858.
#Movie lighthouse keeper cracked#
Miller, Superintendent and Inspector of Lights on the Northwest Lakes, visited the station and found that half of the deck of the light had crumbled down and the upper part of the tower was so badly cracked that he thought $100 would have to be spent to remove the upper portion of the tower and repair it with 5,000 new brick. Five lamps set in fourteen-inch reflectors were used atop this brick tower that had a height of sixty-five feet. The first federal lighthouse to serve what was then Southport was erected on Simmons Island in 1848, after a contract for its erection had been advertised the previous September. Henry Dodge, the first Governor of the Territory of Wisconsin, petitioned Congress for a lighthouse at Southport in 1842, 1843, and 1844, before a bill was passed in 1845 appropriating $4,000 for the project. Around 1840, a tower consisting of four posts, twenty-four feet high and topped by a square lantern, was built by subscription at a cost of $60 to replace the stump light. A layer of stones was then placed atop the stump, and on this various citizens, who served week-long stints as keepers, would kindle a fire of wood every evening during the navigation season.
To create the first “lighthouse” at Kenosha, a large oak on the shore of Lake Michigan was cut down in the 1830s, leaving a ten-foot-high stump. Finally, the name was changed to Kenosha in 1850, when the city was chartered.
Then, in 1837, the inhabitants of the place voted to call the settlement Southport, as it was the southernmost Lake Michigan port in Wisconsin.
Early traders and settlers knew it as Pike Creek, the stream whose branches passed on either side of Washington Island (now Simmons Island), before emptying into Lake Michigan. Kenosha has had a few names through the years and quite a few lighthouses as well.
0 kommentar(er)
