Sand Point Light: Guarding the UP's Iron Shore

Escanaba sits on Little Bay de Noc, a sheltered arm of northern Lake Michigan, and for decades the ore boats that kept the steel mills running depended on a single lighthouse to find the harbor.

Sand Point Light was built in eighteen sixty-eight, right at the moment when the Upper Peninsula's iron mines were shifting into full production. Ore came down by rail from the interior and loaded onto ships in Escanaba, bound for the furnaces of Pittsburgh and Gary. The lighthouse guided those vessels through the shoals at the tip of Sand Point.

It operated as an official aid to navigation for about seventy years before the Coast Guard deactivated it in nineteen thirty-nine. Locals fought to restore it, and since nineteen eighty-nine it has operated again as an unofficial landmark, open to visitors in summer. Today Escanaba is the third-largest city in the Upper Peninsula, and the lighthouse it built to serve the iron economy still stands at the water's edge.