Point Cabrillo Light Station, California • Hoy Low and Hoy High Lighthouses • Our Sister Service • Russian Lighthouses 1870 – 2005
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TH THEE KKEEPE E E P E RR’ S’ S VOLUME XXIII NUMBER FOUR, 2007 • Point Cabrillo Light Station, California • Hoy Low and Hoy High Lighthouses • Our Sister Service • Russian Lighthouses 1870 – 2005 Reprinted from U. S. Lighthouse Society’s The Keeper’s Log – Summer 2007 <www.uslhs.org> Reprinted from the U. S. Lighthouse Society’s The Keeper’s Log – Summer 2007 <www.uslhs.org> Point Cabrillo Light Station, California By Bruce Rogerson and James Kimbrell n terms of age Point Cabrillo Light Station is a mere youngster, having first been lit in June 1909. However, the location I of the lighthouse on a fifty-foot bluff two miles north of Mendocino Village on the rugged coast of northern California is of great historic significance. Less than half a mile to the north lies Frolic Cove, the site of one of the most important ship wrecks on the Pacific Coast. Two miles to the south, at the mouth of Big River, is the site of the first lumber mill on the Mendocino Coast. Point Cabrillo is named for Juan Rodri- guez Cabrillo, the earliest European navigator and explorer to visit the Pacific Coast of Cali- fornia. One of his lieutenants is reported to have sailed this coast in 1542 and to have named Cape Mendocino after the Spanish Governor of New Spain or Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza. Early 19th Century Portuguese settlers and fishermen in nearby Fort Bragg, who claim Cabrillo as one their countrymen, may have given the name to the headland and subsequently to the Light Station. Point Cabrillo has been a silent witness to a panoply of human history down through the ages: the early prehistoric peoples who arrived at the end of the Great Ice Age; the Mitom Pomo, who perhaps were witness to the billowing sails of great Spanish Manila Treasure Galleons off the coast in the 17th Above – Point Cabrillo Lighthouse under construction in 1909. and 18th centuries; Aleut fur hunters in their Below – The finished lighthouse in late 1909. Photos courtesy of the U. S. Coast Guard. skin baidarkas during the days of the Russian settlements in the early 1800s at Fort Ross, 60 miles to the south; or ragged parties of moun- tain men searching for the elusive beaver in the 1830s. The indigenous Mitom Pomo people used the grassy, wind swept headlands as a summer gathering site, moving down from their winter villages in the coastal hills and forest around present day Willits in large family groups in the late spring and early summer each year. They camped on the coast at Buldam, near present day Mendocino and Big River, for several months gathering the bounty of the local waters and grasslands. Large shellfish middens found on the property evidence these visits and the diet and culture of these ancient people. These middens also show, by way of broken pottery chards and Reprinted from The Keeper’s Log – Summer 2007 <www.uslhs.org> pieces of bottle glass, the Pomo’s interaction with of Edinburgh Ale for the thirsty miners. She which protects the bay at the north end of the the wreck of the Frolic in 1850. sailed for California in June 1850. present day Point Cabrillo. Her crew got off safely The Frolic was a two masted clipper brig built On July 25, 1850 in the late evening under and some eventually made their way by long by Gardner Brothers of Baltimore in 1845, for the clear skies but with the land blanketed in low boat and overland to San Francisco. The Pomo August Heard Co. of Boston. She was 97-feet lying fog, the Frolic ran aground on the reef people salvaged much of the valuable cargo. overall, 24-foot beam and displaced 209 tons. She was built for speed to compete in the lucra- tive, and then legal, Opium trade from the West Coast of India to the South China Sea ports. She traded successfully under the command of Captain Edward Faucon from 1846 to 1849. However, the advent of steam powered vessels made the Frolic, which relied entirely on favor- able winds, obsolescent and unable to compete profitably for her owners. In 1850, her master and agents in China decided to find another trade for the Frolic. Gold had been discovered in 1849 in Cali- fornia and the Gold Rush was in full swing. The growing population of San Francisco and the foothills of California had a voracious demand for goods and materials of all kinds. So the Frolic loaded a mixed cargo of Chinese mer- Above – The ship Caspar loading lumber at the Caspar Mill, a mile north of the lighthouse. chandize at South China ports including pot- Below – Caspar Lumber Mill and the log holding pond. Some logs have just come down the tery, hardware, valuable silks and 6,108 bottles chute into the pond. Photos courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. Reprinted from The Keeper’s Log – Summer 2007 <www.uslhs.org> Harbor in the north to Gualala and Stewarts Point to the south. The ocean provided the highway to the markets of the U. S. A. and abroad for the redwood lumber products of the County. The schooners (both sail, and later, steam powered) provided the means of delivery, summer and winter through any kind of wind and weather the Pacific Ocean could throw at their hardy and skilled crews. The trade lasted almost a century, beginning in 1853 and ending sadly in the depression years of the 1930s, as the rail car and the road truck replaced the ubiquitous cargo ves- sels of the coast. The sturdy schooners also carried pas- sengers up and down the coast for many years; offering speedier and more comfort- able journeys than could be had by stage- coach over the poor county roads before the advent of rail travel on the North Coast of California. Following the establishment of U.S. juris- diction over the Oregon Territories and Cali- Construction of the station barn in 1909. Photo courtesy of the U. S. Coast Guard. fornia in the 1840’s, the U.S. Treasury and he following year, Harry Meiggs, mill was shipped round Cape Horn from the the owner of the dock to which the East Coast, and after being transshipped in TFrolic was bound, sent Jerome Ford San Francisco, landed on the beach at Big to investigate the wreck. All the valuable River. More mills followed until every inlet cargo had already been removed; instead and creek mouth had its small or large mill N he discovered the vast stands of redwoods churning out sawn redwood and douglas fir A Trinidad Head and douglas fir, and the small coves or “dog- planks for shipment to the growing metrop- Lighthouse CALIFORNIA holes” along the shore that might harbor a olis of San Francisco. E ship large enough to transport timber, which For almost 100 years timber was king and was very much in demand for the expan- provided lumber, ties, shingles, piling and C sion of San Francisco in the midst of the more, produced by the sawmills dotting the EUREKA Gold Rush fervor. A year later the first saw- Mendocino coast from Shelter Cove and Bear Cape Mendocino Lighthouse C I F I C Point Cabrillo A Lighthouse Point Arena The original fog signal included duplicate engines and compressors. These oil-gas engines Lighthouse were built by Western Gas Engine Company of Los Angeles and the compressors by Dorr Engineering & Pump Company of San Francisco. Both were housed in the same building as the lighthouse tower, which was known then as the “fog signal building.” Photo courtesy of the U. S. Coast Guard. RN Reprinted from The Keeper’s Log – Summer 2007 <www.uslhs.org> The smithy (blacksmith shop) during WWII with Quonset Hut attached to provide barracks for tion of $50,000 for establishment of the sta- the USCG Detachment. Oil house is at left. Photo courtesy of the U. S. Coast Guard. tion, was introduced and finally approved the Lighthouse Board moved quickly to Although Point Cabrillo was surveyed on June 20, 1906. establish lighthouses as critical aids to navi- as a possible lighthouse site as early as 1873 Construction of the Point Cabrillo Light gation along the Pacific coast. Moving north by the U.S. Lighthouse Service, no further Station commenced in August, 1908. The from San Francisco Bay, lighthouses were progress was made until 1904. Following a original building contract was for $21,000 constructed at Point Bonita, Point Reyes, spate of disastrous shipwrecks and resultant and the 30.5-acre property was purchased Point Arena, Cape Mendocino, Humboldt loss of life, petitions from local mill owners from local rancher David Gordon for $3,195. Bay and Crescent City. Over the later half and ship owners became so numerous that on The contracted work was for five main build- of the 19th Century there remained a long October 3, 1904, the U. S. Lighthouse Ser- ings of the station, the lighthouse/fog signal reach of the northern California coast vice Board finally recommended the estab- building, three keeper’s dwellings and the unmarked by a beacon aiding coastal ves- lishment of a light and fog signal station at barn. At the same time the Army Corps of sels for almost 100 miles from Point Arena or near Point Cabrillo. In late January 1905, Engineers constructed additional improve- to Cape Mendocino. Senate Bill No. 6648, making an appropria- ments including the access roads, sewers and water systems, pump house, blacksmith/car- penter’s shop and the three storage buildings at the rear of the houses.