Humboldt Harbor Light

On the evening of December twentieth, eighteen fifty-six, keeper John Johnson climbed to the lantern room of the new Humboldt Harbor Lighthouse and lit its fourth-order Fresnel lens for the first time, making it the last of the original eight West Coast lighthouses to come on. The tower, roughly fifty feet tall, rose from a Cape Cod-style keeper's house right on the Eureka waterfront, guiding lumber ships and Gold Rush supply vessels through the treacherous bar at the mouth of Humboldt Bay. It was a difficult station: the coast here is famous for fog, the bay bar was unpredictable, and the building sat low and damp.

By the late eighteen hundreds the lighthouse was considered unreliable, and the service eventually shifted the light to a new station at Table Bluff. The original tower, neglected for decades, collapsed around nineteen thirty-three. Only the memory and a few photographs remain of one of California's oldest light stations.