Key West, Florida, Lighthouse

Lighthouses are an integral part of the heritage of hundreds of communities along America's thousands of miles of ocean and lake shoreline.

With their prominent location, they stand as important visual landmarks.

Given their critical role in aiding navigation, lighthouses have long been (at least until recently) a quite important type of public building. As Samuel Willard Crompton notes in The Lighthouse Book: "In August 1789, the new United States Congress assumed control of and responsbility for all lighthouses, including those to be built in the future ... During the first twenty years of the Republic, Presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson made all appointments within the lighthouse system personally."

For generations, lighthouses were manned -- with trim "keepers" houses or cottages nearby. In recent decades, almost all lighthouses have been automated. But technological advances, such as computer-based global positioning systems, are even starting to render the basic navigational light-beacon function of lighthouses obsolete. As a result, the U.S. Coast Guard has been relinquishing ownership of lighthouses across the country.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, in recognition of the threat to lighthouses, named Michigan's Lighthouses to its 1998 list of 11 most endangered historic places in America. The National Trust, and other preservation groups, also supported passage of the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000.

Three of Michigan's Lighthouses: Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse, built in 1892 (brown, with a bright red roof); the Au Sable Point Lighthouse, by Lake Superior (tall white lighthouse, with keeper's house to its right); and the Forty Mile Point Light on Lake Huron, built in 1897 (square white lighthouse in center of red brick house)

The National Park Service, in testimony in support of the Lighthouse Preservation Act, noted that "the United States has the largest number and the most architecturally diverse collection of lighthouses of any country in the world," but warned that "in the near future, the Federal government is expected to dispose of several hundred additional light stations. Current procedures for disposal of these sites do not allow for all potential stewards for historic light stations to be considered. This bill would provide a mechanism to allow various non-profit entities a chance to become stewards of these light stations."

As Henry I. Gonzalez, a spokesman for the United States Lighthouse Society observed in his testimony, "The biggest contribution of this Act is that it will provide a statute-based opportunity for non-profit organizations, educational agencies, or community development organizations to have "excessed" historic light station properties conveyed to them for educational, cultural, or historic preservation purposes."

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