A tramway led from the station to the shore, 300 feet to the south. Water for the steam whistles was procured from the bay by a fireplug ejector placed on a small crib. The frame, one-story fog signal building, which housed duplicate machinery and boilers for ten-inch steam whistles, was located 100 feet southwest of the lighthouse and was covered with corrugated iron on the outside and plain iron inside. The tower, built three bricks thick, is surmounted by an octagonal lantern room originally equipped with a fixed, fourth-order Fresnel lens that had a focal plane of forty-three-and-a-half-feet above the ground. Two Harbors Lighthouse consists of a two-story, square, redbrick dwelling with gables facing the south and west, and a twelve-foot-square light tower attached between these gables. Too late to be of service that season, the station was put into operation on April 15, 1892, with Charles Lederle as its first head keeper and Henry Spurbeck as assistant keeper. Construction continued uninterrupted through the summer and fall, and the lighthouse and fog signal were finished in November, when the fog signal was tested and found to function satisfactorily. After an approach to the site from the harbor’s breakwater was cleared, blasting for the foundation of the lighthouse was carried out in August and September. Work on the headland commenced on July 15, 1891. After plans for a tower with an attached keeper’s dwelling were drawn up, advertisements for the work were circulated, and a contract was awarded in June 1891. Condemnation proceedings were initiated in July 1890, and a deed to the site was finally obtained two months later. The fog signal boilers and machinery were completed under contract and delivered to the lighthouse depot at Detroit in the first half of 1890, but as the owners of the desired land were “obstinate” and “refused to sell,” the Board had to ask the State of Minnesota to intervene. As the pier in Agate Bay was deemed “so narrow and so exposed to the sea that the station, if built upon it, would be insecure,” the Lighthouse Board decided the station had to be built on the rocky promontory separating the two bays. Fog was very prevalent on Lake Superior, and the Lighthouse Board felt fog-signals were much needed at frequented harbors. The first load of iron ore from the Vermilion Range was loaded on the steamer Hecla and consort-barge Ironton on August 1, 1884, and within two years, the Minnesota Iron Company was shipping a half-million tons of ore from Agate Bay each year.Ĭongress appropriated $10,000 on Augfor a lighthouse and keeper’s dwelling at Two Harbors, which was “rapidly coming into prominence by reason of its shipments of iron ore.” Frustrated in its attempts to acquire a site on the headlands, the Lighthouse Board decided to place the light at the outer end of the harbor pier under construction in Agate Bay and estimated the work could be completed during the 1889 navigation season.ĭue to the delay in starting the project, Congress had to renew the original $10,000 appropriation in October 2, 1888, and to this they added $5,500 on March 2, 1889, for a fog signal. Tower partnered with other investors to form the Minnesota Iron Company in 1882, and using their pooled resources, construction of a railroad to link Agate Bay and the Vermilion Range commenced the following year. The two villages merged and reincorporated as the city of Two Harbors in 1907.īetween 18, Charlemagne Tower, a financier from Philadelphia, purchased 20,000 acres of land in the Vermilion Range, located roughly sixty miles inland from Two Harbors. The village of Burlington was platted along the shore of Burlington Bay in 1856, while the village of Agate Bay was laid out in 1885. Two Harbors Lighthouse is situated on a point that separates Agate Bay and Burlington Bay.
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