History of lighthouses in Canada
The history of lighthouses in Canada dates to 1734.
The 18th century
The Louisbourg Lighthouse was the first lighthouse in what was to become Canada (and the second in North America after the 1716 Boston Light).[1] It was constructed at the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1734, patterned after the 1682 Phare des Baleines at Saint-Clément-des-Baleines. The Louisbourg Lighthouse was destroyed by British troops during the siege of 1758, and rebuilt in 1842; the rubble of the original tower is visible at the base of the current lighthouse, which dates from 1923.
Next came the
Another early lighthouse in the Maritime provinces, at Cape Roseway
In 1791 the first lighthouse was built at the entrance to Saint John on
Early 19th century
John Ford designed Gibraltar Point Lighthouse on what is now known as the Toronto Islands in 1829.[3] It was decommissioned in 1907, but remains as the oldest existing lighthouse on the Great Lakes, since the one built in 1804 at the mouth of the Niagara River was demolished to make room for Fort Mississauga during the War of 1812.
Other early lighthouses on Lake Ontario included False Ducks Island in 1828, Point Petre in 1831, Nine Mile Point in 1833, and Presqu'ile in 1840. The latter two are still standing, although Presqu'ile had its lantern removed in 1965. In that same year, False Duck was demolished and its lantern eventually became the centrepiece of Mariner's Memorial Lighthouse Park and Museum[4] near Milford, Ontario.
Meanwhile, in
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Originalcapespear.jpg/220px-Originalcapespear.jpg)
In 1813 the earliest lighthouse on Newfoundland was built at Fort Amherst to mark "The Narrows" of St. John's harbor. Cape Spear and Cape Bonavista were built by Britain's Trinity House in 1836 and 1843, receiving the old reflector lamp apparatus from Scotland's famous Inchkeith and Bell Rock lighthouses, respectively.
The shipbuilding boom in Canada's Atlantic Provinces prompted a flurry of lighthouse construction, starting in 1829 with
On Cape Breton Island after 1826, the General Mining Association consolidated the mines around Sydney Harbour and greatly increased the shipping of coal to ports on the Atlantic coast.[7] In support of this effort, a lighthouse was built at Low Point in 1832 to aid vessels entering Sydney Harbour.[8] This first lighthouse was an octagonal wood tower, 69 feet high, with red and white stripes and a red round iron lantern containing a third-order double bullseye lens manufactured in France by Barbier, Benard, et Turenne.[9] This first Low Point Lighthouse was replaced in 1932 with an octagonal concrete lighthouse, surmounted by a rare circular iron lantern housing, painted red, the only remaining circular lantern in Nova Scotia; built by Chance Brothers, England's famous builders of lenses and lanterns,[10] currently housing a rotating DCB-36 (36 inch diameter) aerobeacon.
Numerous shipwrecks led to the construction in 1839 of lighthouses at Scatari Island and at both ends of
The 60-foot (18 m) conical brick tower built during 1845-7 at Point Prim is the oldest lighthouse on Prince Edward Island. It was designed and built by Isaac Smith, the same eminent architect who designed Province House in Charlottetown.[11]
Around mid-century, the use of whale or seal oil as lantern fuel was alleviated by the development of kerosene by Dr. Abraham Pineo Gesner.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Cape_Pine_lighthouse.jpg/220px-Cape_Pine_lighthouse.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Cape_race_nfld.jpg/220px-Cape_race_nfld.jpg)
In 1851, a 40-year-old mechanism from the Isle of May in Scotland was installed atop Newfoundland's new Cape Pine lighthouse.[12] The tower was designed by the firm Alexander S. Gordon using the same prefabricated cast-iron approach as Gibbs Hill Lighthouse and other outposts of the British Empire. Subsequently, despite being unsuitable for the damp and cold winters, many cast-iron lighthouses were built in Newfoundland, including Channel-Port aux Basques in 1875, Lobster Cove Head[13] in 1892, and the lighthouse which now guards the National Museum of Science & Technology[14] which, after 50 years of service at Cape Race, was dismantled and re-erected with a new lantern at Cape North (NS) in 1906. Then in 1980, after a local outcry had kept the Seal Island lantern from being taken away, the historic lighthouse at the northern tip of Cape Breton was instead targeted for relocation to Ottawa.
In 1884, public clamour following the 1867 Queen of Swansea tragedy led to a cast-iron lighthouse being erected at the summit of Gull Island, off Newfoundland's Bay de Verde peninsula. At an elevation of 525 feet (160 m), it is the highest light on the eastern seaboard.
The Imperial Lights, 1857-60
By the mid 19th century it was apparent that the economic development of British North America was being hampered by obsolete navigational aids. Lobbying by the Admiralty and by Canadian shipping magnates such as Montreal's Hugh Allan resulted in an ambitious three-year building program, where all material and construction costs would be borne by Great Britain. The so-called Imperial Towers were tall conical towers of brick or masonry construction where, in some cases, the granite was quarried and prepared by Scottish stonemasons, and shipped to the colony as ballast. By 1850s standards they must have seemed imperial, i.e. built to withstand the ages.
Henri Maurice Perrault designed lighthouses in
Four towers were built along the approaches to the Saint Lawrence: at Cap-des-Rosiers on the Gaspe peninsula; in the Strait of Belle Isle; at Pointe Amour near L'Anse Amour on the Labrador coast; and at West Point on Anticosti Island. At 112 feet (34 m), the latter rivalled Cap des Rosiers as the tallest lighthouse in Canada until its replacement by an airport-type beacon and demolition in 1967.
Six
Construction of the 60-foot (18 m) wooden lighthouse built on a caisson offshore from
Kivas Tully designed a Lighthouse and Keeper's House, at Queen's Wharf, Tonronto, Ontario, in 1861. The lighthouse was relocated in 1929 at Lake Shore Boulevard West and Fleet Street.[20][21]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Fisgard_Lighthouse%2C_Vancouver_Island%2C_BC.jpg/220px-Fisgard_Lighthouse%2C_Vancouver_Island%2C_BC.jpg)
Offshore from Vancouver Island on Canada's Pacific coast, the
An interesting screw-pile lighthouse was built at Sandheads off the mouth of the Fraser river in 1880; it was demolished in 1913 and replaced by a lightship. After building a long jetty to stabilize the channel location, in 1960 a new lighthouse was built at Sandheads.
Latter 19th century
The new Dominion of Canada undertook another round of lighthouse building following Confederation. The 1870s saw well over 100 new lighthouses go into operation; during this period Sable Island, "the graveyard of the Atlantic", and Bird Rock, an outcrop of the Magdalen Islands archipelago, were finally lit.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Phare_et_maison_1930_Miscou.jpg/220px-Phare_et_maison_1930_Miscou.jpg)
A great number of lighthouses built during the 19th century were tapering wooden towers, usually four or eight-sided. They had the advantage of being cheap to build, and in some cases could be relocated if the site was threatened by erosion. Surviving examples include Miscou Island and Mulholland Point (on Campobello Island) in New Brunswick, Margaretsville (NS), and Panmure Island, East Point, North Cape, West Point, Cape Bear, and Woods Island on Prince Edward Island.
Many of the towers from the 1870-1900 period were attached to the dwelling, for example Peases Island
John Corbett moved to
Unfortunately, there is a long list of wooden lighthouses which burned down, including the second one at Cape Ray in Newfoundland, the one on Ile Haute in the Bay of Fundy, Holland Rock in BC, and the one on remote Greenly Island, south of Labrador. The latter made headlines in 1928 when the German aircraft Bremen crash-landed thereafter making the first successful east-west transatlantic flight.
Colonel Anderson's Tenure, 1900–1914
In the 1870s responsibility for navigational aids was transferred from the Department of Public Works to the Department of Marine and Fisheries. In 1904 the department's Lighthouse Board was given a broader mission, and its dynamic chairman Colonel
In 1904, the pre-fabricated cast-iron lighthouse at Fame Point, near Anse-a-Valleau on the Gaspe coast, became the first maritime wireless (Marconi) station in North America. In 1977, this lighthouse was dismantled and became a tourist attraction in Quebec City, but it was returned to its original site in 1997 and the whole light station, known today as Pointe-à-la-Renommée, has been restored.
To support the higher-order lenses (which floated in a bath of mercury), exposed ferro-concrete towers were sometimes buttressed, such as at Point Atkinson[25] in Lighthouse Park near Vancouver BC, Natashquan Point in Quebec, Ile Parisienne in Lake Superior, or at Langara and Sheringham Point on Vancouver Island. In 1910 one of these towers was built at the windswept summit of Triangle Island, 25 miles (40 km) off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. However, this turned out to be a costly blunder; at an elevation of 650 feet (200 m), the light was far too high to be visible in bad weather. After 10 years, the lantern was dismantled and brought back to the Coast Guard base in Victoria while the original plan of building a lighthouse at Cape Scott was carried out in 1927.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Construction_du_phare_de_Pointe-au-P%C3%A8re_en_1909.jpg/220px-Construction_du_phare_de_Pointe-au-P%C3%A8re_en_1909.jpg)
The art of building tall lighthouses using reinforced concrete reached its ultimate expression in the flying buttresses of
Some lighthouses from the early 1900s were of traditional 8-sided timber construction, such as at Point Riche near Port au Choix, Newfoundland, Henry Island in Cape Breton (NS), at
The ornate Point Abino Light Tower near Fort Erie, Ontario dates from 1917. It was built as a memorial to the crew of the Buffalo-based US Lightship #82 which went down with all hands during the infamous Great Lakes Storm of 1913, which claimed a total of twelve ships and 235 lives.
See also
References
- The Lighthouse by Dudley Whitney, Random House Value Pub (1975) ISBN 0-517-66953-6
- Sentinels in the Stream: Lighthouses of the St. Lawrence River by George Fisher and Claude Bouchard, Boston Mills Press (2001) ISBN 1-55046-353-5
- The First Landfall: Historic Lighthouses of Newfoundland and Labrador by David John Molloy, Breakwater Books Ltd (1994) ISBN 1-55081-096-0
- Northern Lights: Lighthouses of Canada by ISBN 1-894073-09-6
- ^ "Louisbourg's French Lighthouse 1734 - 1758". Louisbourg Heritage Society. Archived from the original on January 15, 2013. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
- ^ "Cape Roseway Lighthouse - Early history". The Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society (NSLPS). Retrieved April 6, 2012.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "John Ford". Dictionary of Architects in Canada. Archived from the original on 2012-12-09. Retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ "Mariners Park Museum". The County of Prince Edward, Ontario. Archived from the original on March 25, 2012. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
- ^ "Edward Cannon". Dictionary of Architects in Canada. Archived from the original on 2012-12-09. Retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ "John Cunningham". Dictionary of Architects in Canada. Archived from the original on April 14, 2013.
- ^ Hornsby, Stephen J., Nineteenth Century Cape Breton, A Historical Geography, McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1992, pp. 95-110.
- ^ "Heritage Notes, No. 13 March 2002". Louisbourg Heritage Society. Archived from the original on 15 January 2013. Retrieved April 5, 2012.
- ^ "History of Low Point Lighthouse". Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society. Retrieved April 5, 2012.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Low Point Lighthouse, The Light Today". Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society. Retrieved April 5, 2012.[permanent dead link]
- ^ "Dictionary of Architects in Canada Isaac Smith". Archived from the original on 2012-05-14. Retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ "Cape Pine, Newfoundland". capepine.com. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
- ^ "Lobster Cove Head Lighthouse". Parks Canada. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
- ^ "Canada Science and Technology Museum". Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation. Archived from the original on March 29, 2012. Retrieved April 6, 2012.
- ^ "Henri Maurice Perrault". Dictionary of Architects in Canada.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Sapulski, Wayne (1996). "The Imperial Towers of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay". Lighthouse Digest. Foghorn Publishing. Retrieved 16 March 2017.
- ^ "Lighthouses@Lighthouse Digest ... The Imperial Towers of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay".
- ^ "Lighthouses « Bruce Coast Lighthouses in Ontario". Archived from the original on 2017-02-09. Retrieved 2017-03-18.
- ^ "HistoricPlaces.ca - HistoricPlaces.ca".
- ^ Globe [Toronto], 14 June 1861, 3, t.c.
- ^ "Kivas Tully". Dictionary of Architects in Canada. Archived from the original on 2012-12-09. Retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ "Herman Otto Tiedemann". Dictionary of Architects in Canada.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Lighthouse (photograph). Pease Island, Nova Scotia: Library and Archives Canada. c. 1890. On Wikimedia Commons at File:Lighthouse Phare (50584575842).jpg. Source at Library and Archives Canada.
- ^ "John Corbett". Dictionary of Architects in Canada. Archived from the original on 2012-12-09. Retrieved 2012-07-04.
- ^ Point Atkinson Lighthouse in Lighthouse Park (photograph). West Vancouver, British Columbia. 26 March 2006.