Grand Traverse Lighthouse

I recently paid my second visit to Grand Traverse Lighthouse on a chilly, overcast day in November. Unlike our first time here over the summer, the tower was climbable and the gift shop was open for business, so I was able to see much more of what the property has to offer. Here’s a rundown of the experience.

This lighthouse is located at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, the “pinkie finger” of Michigan’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula. We drove up the east side of the Leelanau Peninsula, passing through the tiny beach towns of Suttons Bay and Northport before arriving at the big water of Lake Michigan.

A short walk from the lighthouse deposits you on a rocky stretch of shoreline, possibly a nice place to hunt for Petoskey stones.

For $8, we were allowed inside the lighthouse. The rooms were decorated to resemble the way they’d have looked between 1922 and 1938, when a large family called the McCormicks tended the light. Touchscreens were dotted around to supply information about the way they the McCormicks lived. According to Lighthousefriends.com, one of the McCormick children was an important early member of the organization that now manages the lighthouse, which may explain their family’s starring role here.

After we paid our fee, we were left entirely to our own devices, free to consume at our leisure the shoddily edited, half-interesting fact sheets that are obligatory on the lighthouse circuit. From these I learned that the current two-story dwelling dates to 1858 and was the successor to a rather more dour-looking, free-standing brick tower built six years earlier. Some modernization work commenced in 1948, bringing upgraded plumbing, central heating and $3,500 of new furniture. However, lighthouses and modernity seldom mix; foreshadowing of obsolescence came in 1950 with the switch from a kerosene lamp to an electric light. The lighthouse said goodbye to its final keepers in 1972 and was revived as a museum in the ’80s.

The museum was decent, but if you’ve been in an old-timey American house with lots of old-timey American stuff on display, there won’t be any surprises. What we were really interested in was getting to the top of the lighthouse.

It took three staircases to get there. First, the wooden.

After passing through a second floor packed with further lighthouse information, we ascended another set of stairs, this time metal and spiral.

We arrived at a small landing with descriptions of local shipwrecks and went up one more twisting set of stairs into the lantern room.

There were no staff members at the top of the lighthouse, so we could sing and dance up there as much as we wanted to. We had plenty of room, because there is no longer any Fresnel lens. They had one on display downstairs, but it wasn’t the one used at this lighthouse.

Aside from the panoramic view, the coolest thing about the lantern room was that, along the bottom of each window pane, there were wooden boards painted to show the islands, bays and industrial plants that can be seen from up there — on a clear day, at least.

Another thing to check out on the property is the “fog signal building.” This went up in 1899 to aid ships when it was too foggy to see the lighthouse. Its services ended in 1972, the same time they stopped having lighthouse keepers. An old brochure provides this bit of color:

“Lighthouse inhabitants remember the fog signal as a heart stopping sound that sent them running deep inside the house to wait for the fog to lift.”

I was glad to visit the gift shop on the way out. Often the gift shops on our lighthouse adventures are closed, because they’re usually super small operations and we tend to show up at odd times. This one stocked a mixture of lighthouse souvenirs and basic supplies for a campground nearby, none of which interested me.

One item did catch my eye, though: a little bell that had the distinction of being the first piece of merchandise I’ve seen for America’s impending 250th birthday.

I couldn’t help but see this as the first lapping wave of a flood of similar trinkets that will probably start cluttering store shelves soon. I’m partially looking forward to this kind of stuff, though — my personal favorite license plate is the Michigan license plate honoring the 1976 bicentennial, so hopefully some future classics will debut soon.

I’ll finish with a sunnier photo from our first trip to this lighthouse, taken on July 12. We drove all the way from Detroit specifically to see it (and a few other lighthouses), camping that night at Arbutus Lake State Forest Campground and driving home the next day.