This camp would go on to be used for nearly every offshore light construction in the Straits of Mackinac. A work camp was established on the Northeastern portion of the island along Scammon’s Harbor (now Cove) in April 1870. The United States Government had purchased an island in the Les Cheneaux island chain (appropriately named Government Island), near Cedarville, Michigan, for use as a base of operations for construction of Spectacle Reef light. Ironically, in September 1869, the Nightingale wrecked on the reef exactly where the lighthouse was to be constructed. Over the course of the fall blueprints were drawn and supply contracts formed for the construction. In May that year two iron can buoys were placed between the two shoals along the ridge in sixteen feet of water, and in July a crew departed Cheboygan and completed their survey of the reef that month. On March 3rd, 1869 Congress finally approved $100,000 to begin plans for a light. These two wrecks resulted in the United States Lighthouse Service (USLHS) taking up the conversations once again of constructing a light on the reef. In the fall of 1867 two vessels, the Annie Voight and the Alice Richards wrecked on the southern shoal and were deemed total losses. Congress began conversations about marking the reef in the early 1850’s with a buoy first being placed in 1856, but the onset of the American Civil War put a halt to any funds being used for lighthouse construction. This meant any vessel that got to close to the reef in any kind of seas would surely bottom out and potentially wreck. The reef was located at the crossing of multiple shipping lanes through the Straits of Mackinac and at a point where waves had a fetch of 170 miles. These two shoal areas with the ridge resemble a pair of eyeglasses when viewed from above, hence the appropriate name “Spectacle Reef.”įor years mariners and shipping companies asked for Spectacle Reef to be marked. Over time erosion and rising lake levels caused this mountain to slowly disappear below the surface of Lake Huron and forming a reef that was “more dreaded by navigators than any other danger unmarked throughout the entire chain of Lakes” and lurked only four feet below the surface of the lake in some areas. The reef is comprised of two limestone mounds in close proximity to each other that are connected by a slightly deeper ridge, the remains of an ancient mountain that once rose out of the bottom of the lake. The story of Spectacle Reef Light Station begins thousands of years ago when the area it now marks was first formed.
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