Warrior Rock Light: Oregon's Smallest Lighthouse

At the northern tip of Sauvie Island, where the Lewis River meets the Columbia and Multnomah Channel, a small lighthouse has marked a submerged bedrock reef since eighteen eighty-nine. Congress authorized it the year before, and architect Carl Leick designed the two-story wood-frame structure set atop a sixteen-foot sandstone foundation. Inside, the ground floor held the clockwork mechanism for a fog bell, a bed, a table, and a stove.

The bell itself was cast in Philadelphia in eighteen fifty-five and had previously hung at Cape Disappointment on the Washington coast, making it one of the oldest pieces of lighthouse equipment in the Pacific Northwest. Warrior Rock Light is Oregon's smallest lighthouse and one of only two in the state not standing on the Pacific Ocean. It is still active today.