Hi everyone, I'm Emily.
And I'm Vince.
And this is the Lighthouse Lowdown.
It's every time.
Vince is in charge of our button mashing today.
Oh, I already messed it up.
Did you mark them?
No, I meant to do the boo boo boo.
Oh, we have that?
Alright, never mind.
We don't have the sound.
We need to add that one, because that's what I think of a lot whenever I'm trying to find certain sounds to play.
Kind of a goofy sound.
Okay, so I promised an American lighthouse and we're not doing that.
Just kidding.
No.
We talked about it so much.
No, we are doing an American lighthouse and this one comes from our listener, Ben.
So, Ben, thank you for sending us an email with this lighthouse and also for being the first person to be brave enough to send us a voicemail over our new website.
Shout out to Ben.
Thank you for doing that.
On the website, what is...
Okay, so I looked at our website because I hadn't looked at it since we changed it.
It's really good.
There's the review page, maybe smile.
But what is the voicemail access?
Because I did not see that.
Someone wants to leave a voicemail.
Let me look.
Like Ben did.
You must have figured it out and I did not.
You know what's funny is that I haven't looked yet to figure it out, but Ben did.
Shout out again to Ben, teaching us how to use our own website.
I didn't realize that was...
Contact.
It's not on there.
Yeah, the videos.
Leave a voicemail.
I bet it's contact.
Okay, so here's that.
Oh.
Oh, there you go.
Okay, leave a voicemail.
Okay, so you can just record.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it just sends me an email and I can listen to it.
We're going to get spam now.
It's going to be great.
I've already gotten a couple of spam emails.
All right.
So avoid doing that, friends.
Lighthouse friends.
Ben told us a very sweet story about how our podcast has impacted his life.
And I won't go into details about it because I didn't get permission to share the story,
so I won't.
But he did give us permission to share a story about the lighthouse that we're doing today.
So I'll tag that on at the end of this episode.
Very cool.
Yeah.
So our history of Bowie is...
Hang on.
Vince and I are sharing screen again for our YouTube and it's more complicated than you
would want it to be.
What am I doing?
We are doing the anatomy of a lighthouse for our history of Bowie today.
I briefly mentioned some things on like our first and second episode, but didn't really
go into detail about each one.
So I'm just going to go from top to bottom of a lighthouse and kind of describe the basic
parts.
And of course, everything varies greatly between lighthouses because there's thousands of them.
I love this diagram already.
Yeah, I messed it up.
You can see there is like this white line that goes around the right side of it.
I was trying to be fancy and then I accidentally cut out the lighthouse from the page and then
move it over a little bit and I didn't know how to undo it.
Oh, well.
Looks cool.
Yeah, I just leave it on there.
So we're going to use Destruction Island Lighthouse as the example where that...
If you go to our YouTube where I have a diagram of this lighthouse marked up so you can see
what parts we're referring to.
But that was just because they had a cool blueprint style cross section of the lighthouse.
Schematics.
I love schematics.
Love them.
So starting from the top, every lighthouse tower has a lightning rod because they're
usually pretty tall and there's a lot of metal on a lighthouse that you wouldn't want to
get hit by lightning.
So they usually have a lightning rod to direct any lightning strikes directly to the ground
instead of to the lighthouse.
And then below that we have a ventilator or a vent ball or a ball vent, which is just
a metal ball that allows airflow to come out of the lantern room because it gets really
hot in there.
I never thought about that.
With the lantern, the light source is probably really hot.
Yeah.
They don't have AC in a lighthouse, so it gets pretty toasty in there.
So they have a ventilator in there for that.
Below that is the dome roof or a cupola, which is just the roof of the lighthouse.
I feel like we talked about that before.
I think we did mention it.
The cupola.
Someone's going to be like, it's a cupola.
Yeah.
Excuse you.
It's not a sandwich meat.
This is the baloney.
The lantern room is below that, arguably the most important part of a lighthouse.
It houses the beacon.
If you have any clockwork mechanism, most of it is going to be in the lantern room.
And I also put a line on there to show you the focal plane.
And that's just the distance between the bullseye of the lens or the very center of the light
beam down to the water level.
So it's not to the ground or to like, it's like some people say the focal plane is like
the height of the lighthouse or whatever.
It's like focal plane is from the center of the beam to the water level.
I did not know focal plane was a distance.
Like it's an optics thing.
I thought it was a line.
The focal plane, yeah, is a line.
But the focal plane height is.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So you're right.
Didn't explain that very well.
I thought you did good.
No, it's a good that we asked.
Below that is the lantern gallery or also called widow's walk or parapet, which is just
a balcony that goes around the lantern room.
And that's so that the keeper can clean all the panes outside of the lighthouse room and
do any maintenance or whatever.
Below that is a watch room and sometimes doubles as a service room or there's a service room
below that.
It just it varies between every lighthouse.
But the watch room is where they can watch storms without having to go up into the lantern
room because the lantern room doesn't have any protection from storms like water.
You know, you can't see through a window when it's covered in water.
There's no overhang or anything.
Yeah.
If you're in the watch room, you have a little bit more protection from water so you can
actually see what's going on outside of the lighthouse.
But you're also close enough to the top of the lighthouse where you can actually accurately
glean what the conditions are for your lens and everything.
Yeah.
And that also has a balcony.
It's called the main gallery or a catwalk, sometimes called a catwalk.
There's other definitions of catwalk to do with lighthouses, but it's mostly like.
Yeah.
OK.
So the main gallery or catwalk is below the lantern gallery.
So is there always?
It's probably a tough question.
Always is a strong word.
Is there usually a lantern gallery and the main gallery separately?
There is usually.
Yeah.
There's sometimes where there's not.
The lighthouse today has one.
So if that varies as well.
But mostly there's a main gallery and a lantern gallery.
Right.
OK.
Yeah.
So then the watch room is also where keepers sometimes keep their logs.
So instead of having to go all the way back down the lighthouse to, you know, if they're
talking about storm conditions or something that's going on with the lens or like this
is what I'm doing right now, then they just go down to the watch room.
Yeah.
Below that is the main tower of the lighthouse is just called the tower.
And it varies so greatly that you can't really make any notes on it because like you could
have like in this example has a spiral staircase.
You could also have a ladder or you could be like you could have your counterweight
shaft or your counterweight in the middle of the lighthouse or in some cases like the
Eddystone lighthouse, you have the keepers living in rooms that make up the tower of
the lighthouse.
So it just.
The tower is actually just very so much that you can count on there being windows and that's
about it.
Windows and some stairs.
Yeah.
Somewhere.
See what else?
What else?
We're down to lintel.
So the lintel is a beam above the doorway or it can be above a window or something.
It's just like a support beam.
Yeah.
And often that's where they have engraved the name of the lighthouse, the year that
it was established and the engineer's name.
And so that's just something I noted on there because it shows up in today's episode as
well.
And then we also often see a counterweight well.
This is something I learned today when I was researching it.
And obviously the counterweight that runs the clockwork mechanism that comes down, it's
just dangling there by a chain.
And so if it were to break and fall all the way from the top of the lighthouse, you'd
have really bad damage to the foundation of your lighthouse, which is horrible news.
And so very smartly, they have put in a well that catches a weight if it were to break
and fall instead of doing damage to the foundation.
It lands on this.
I didn't have time to look up what it's made of or what the shape is or anything, but
basically it's just a countermeasure to this weight.
Is there any...
So the weight under normal operation, the weight is on a suspended chain and it falls
slowly downwards and that movement...
Rotates.
Rotates the clockwork at a certain pace, which...
All right.
So when the weight gets to the bottom, the counterweight, we'll say, does it go into
the well as far as like it's a clearance, like it needs to go that far?
I think I've seen...
Or is it just for falling if it were to say that?
It's not always.
It's not like the length of the lighthouse is the length that it has to go before it's
rewound up to the lighthouse again.
It's just sometimes it can be that length and it gets close but never touches the well.
Because then it would stop.
Yeah.
Like today's lighthouse, I think, only goes 60 feet before it has to be rewound.
I didn't make a note of what the distance was, but I remember reading something like
that, like, oh, it wasn't the full length of the lighthouse.
Yeah.
Well, there was one lighthouse, I want to say...
I want to say it was Alcatraz.
It was one of those lighthouses that had...
They had dug a well in the island for the weight to be...
Cradled?
Cradled in because the lighthouse lantern room was at the level of the island.
It was at earth level, ground level.
Oh.
And then when they put...
They rebuilt the lighthouse for some reason and they put it on a pier over the water because
that way the weight could go down towards water level rather than digging in the earth.
Oh, interesting.
So they still had room for the weight to fall under normal operation or failure.
That's interesting.
I don't think you mentioned that in the episode.
I can't remember.
I don't know if it was Alcatraz.
I was going to say it was East Brother, but that's not right because that was not my episode
and it wasn't the very tall island, East Brother.
No.
Okay.
Well, thanks.
The last note on the right, what does that say?
Sorry, my handwriting is awful so everyone can see it on the YouTube.
Also, the pen, the studio pen I was using in Procreate is not made for writing.
It wants to smooth out any stroke you make.
So it became very swoopy and flat and not very good.
Anyway, the bottom is concrete foundation and sometimes...
So the bottom of the lighthouse, there's all kinds of stuff you could do at the bottom
of a lighthouse, but once again, the lighthouse today, there's a reason I did this for the
history of Buoyas because there's so many mentions of little things.
I'm like, I should probably do anatomy of a lighthouse.
But the bottom can have a buttress, which is like external support for the lighthouse.
So it's like a bulbous bottom, sometimes shaped like a donut or it's tapered or something.
You can also have a...
The bottom of the lighthouse can be on a caisson or like a crib like we talked about on
island lighthouses, they have cribs.
It can also be a workspace, like a room that is just the bottom of the lighthouse.
The entryway.
Berries, berries, berries.
What was the...
I'm thinking of Hatteras, right?
Oh, yeah.
The base of it we saw was the grid.
Yeah, fancy.
That was really cool.
It took a lot of concrete.
Well, that was Hatteras, for those who don't know, was moved.
It was one of the lighthouses that was moved and there's a long recorded history we've talked about on that too.
I feel like we should do another episode on that because we only did a 15 minute conversation on it because we were there.
Yeah, the Outer Banks, for those who haven't listened, has some awesome lighthouses, including Hatteras.
Is it Hatteras Island?
Hatteras Island light?
Hatteras Point?
I don't actually know.
I thought it was just Hatteras.
It's the tallest in the US and you would probably recognize it if you know any lighthouses.
Cape Hatteras. Oh my gosh.
We are horrible.
Yeah, we should know. We were there.
We were there.
Anyway.
That is parts of Lighthouse, our lighthouse anatomy.
Good history, Booyah. Look at you.
Thank you.
Destruction Island lighthouse.
Sounds so cool.
I know, we should really look at it.
It's a clockwork history of Booyah.
So I can explain exactly what happens there.
I shouldn't. That'll be next.
Mark my words, everyone.
Okay, so our lighthouse today, we're heading over to Northern California.
So now we've done a couple of California lighthouses.
This lighthouse is unique in that it is tall and thin.
It doesn't have any taper to the walls. So it's just like a cylinder.
A pencil. Yes, a pencil.
And it's 115 feet tall, white with a black lantern room and a white solid balcony around the bottom.
So like the main gallery is just...
I'll show you a picture.
Wow. Oh, cool.
Yeah.
Wow, it looks new.
It's very clean. They do...
They take really good care of it.
Because it's very often visited and a lot of people love this lighthouse.
Great.
This is the lighthouse.
I couldn't find if the lantern room right now is still original.
I want to say yes. At least the roof is still original.
Oh, and this is a good picture. You can see that vent ball up here.
Yeah. And the lightning rod.
And our cupola.
Nice.
Yeah, this is a good example of for being able to see all the parts of a lighthouse that I was talking about.
Anyway, right now its flash pattern is one white flash every 15 seconds.
And that was different in history, which is another one of those cool things to go see at the lighthouse.
I'll talk about it later.
But in this picture, you can also see the foghorn, the old foghorn building.
Nice. It's big.
Yeah, I know it's fancy.
So what lighthouse is this?
I'm sorry. This is Point Arena Lighthouse.
You can see it there.
Point Arena Lighthouse.
Point Arena. Yeah. Northern California.
How far north? Because we talk about San Francisco. Is that considered north?
It's north of LA.
San Francisco is probably middle of the California.
Middle of the California.
It's a big state. I'm aware.
I think this is not that far north. It's like kind of just like in the middle of the top half of California.
People do say though, they say Northern California. It's a whole different region.
Yeah. It's not just like the very tip-top.
In the 1850s and the 1860s, the redwood lumber shipments started to increase from Northern California to San Francisco.
And so they had to start putting lighthouses along this coastline so that people wouldn't crash with all of their redwood lumber.
So this point, Point Arena, is where the coast changes from like a northwest direction to a north direction.
So the coast turns. And so they needed to mark it directly with a lighthouse.
So they knew where the turning point of the coast is.
So the point itself, I don't know if I got a picture of this. Kind of.
Oh, cool. That is not what I expected.
Yeah, it's from the picture. You can't tell that it's that the ground looks like this.
But the point itself is like a very narrow plateau.
The top of this is almost perfectly horizontal, which was good for building.
But then the edges are very vertical. They have cliff edges.
Yeah, very sheer.
So it's like a little plateau. It's about 200 to 300 feet wide and about a thousand feet long, depending on where you measure from.
And the rock at the end was not good for building. So they built about 400 feet back from the tip of the point.
I don't know how they discovered that the rock wasn't good.
I think that there was like a lot of cracks or something, you know, just over time.
In this image, you can see the foremost edge is actually falling off.
Oh, yeah. It started to shift down. It still has the topsoil on it.
The side around the foghorn building is pretty skinny.
I would guess it's been deteriorating.
I bet so.
But yeah, it's not a lot there.
It's not like rocky cliff. It's like sand rock.
That fence, if you look at the fence, it seems quite necessary.
Yeah.
Stay away from the edges.
Yeah, they actually added that fence line after someone died falling off the rocks. I know it was like a construction worker.
He's like, oh, son of a bitch.
That sucks.
But there was so much picket fence. Look at all that fence.
Had to have been just so much money.
Let's just keep people from going too close to the edge.
Anyway, so something interesting that I actually read up quite a bit on on this lighthouse is that
so this is not the original lighthouse, this like very tall and skinny.
The original was a very classic brick tapered tower light.
And what they did for building this lighthouse originally was that they made the bricks on site.
Because if you think about hauling hundreds of thousands of bricks, it would just be so expensive.
And so what they used to do is that they would set up kilns like a couple of miles away from their building site.
And this was true for construction anywhere like it for anything to make bricks for a construction site.
They would just go a couple of miles away and then they would dig up clay from it was like they would make a brick yard where they would dig up clay.
And then and they would mix it with other chemicals, whatever it is that makes clay good for bricks.
I don't know, like add something to glue. Yeah.
And they would place it into a mold and then pop it back out.
So it's just like a wooden box that you'd stuff clay into and then pop it out.
And then they'd leave the brick to dry for a couple of weeks, just like under the sun.
Spread them out. And then they would pile these dried bricks up into a kiln formation and then light a fire inside and then it would bake the bricks.
That's cool. Yeah. So they never like a kiln was made up of bricks that were being fired.
It wasn't like a thing that you put bricks into and take it out like that may have been true later.
But in like the mid eighteen hundreds, this is kind of what they did for construction was just bake bricks around a fire.
Makes sense. That's really cool. Yeah.
So this kiln method was used for five hundred thousand bricks for construction of this lighthouse.
And then they also shipped in one hundred and fourteen thousand higher quality bricks to be the outside of the lighthouse.
So they actually. Yeah, I read about that, too, is that they would just hand like sand the outside of the bricks to be more flat and then they would have a stamp in them for whatever.
That's crazy. Yeah. So that's why a lot of times when you see older buildings, the bricks will have a stamp in them like just it's just the outside that has these fancy stamped like really nice bricks and the inside have just.
Yeah, wobbly bricks. The facade is what you see. Yeah.
They finished building it in eighteen seventy and that was in April and it was first lit May 1st of eighteen seventy.
It was a hundred feet tall and had a first order.
Fray now lens.
Right now. Yeah. Sounds wrong for now for now.
Well, that was different than what I was saying.
It's not fray.
They also built a large brick, two and a half story keepers dwelling.
And that was to house four keepers and their families.
I was like, let me see if I have a I don't think I have a picture, but I'm going to find one actually for keepers right off the bat. Yeah.
One head keeper and three assistants. It's quite a staff.
There we go. Look at that house. That's an amazing house. I know.
They're like, we got extra room in the budget. So it's very this lighthouse.
Very classic, very clean and pretty. This is like visually one of my favorite lighthouses shapes.
And also, yeah, I like the ones that are like integral lighthouses that are just like a lighthouse on top of a house.
I like that. What do you have any idea of what year this is? Eighteen seventy.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's so that's when it's marked.
So I want to but I feel like nobody took photos that early. I think they did. I think it was rare.
I don't think it was an easy thing to do. Yeah.
I think in the bottom of this picture, these are all flowers.
The lighthouse keepers daughters. I'll talk about this later.
They wrote a lot about that. The lighthouse is often surrounded by flowers like yellow and purple flowers.
And that's cool. Yeah. Anyway, beautiful colorized. I know.
We can just go back in time, experience it for ourselves. Oh, no.
It's our website, the Lighthouse Lowdown.
Just another reminder, go to the.
Just trying to get everything situated.
We haven't done sharing screen in a very long time.
Accidentally plugged our own website. I know.
Oops. What is this? This is our cat, Joey.
Oh, man. OK. So, yeah, I actually want the picture to be up again.
Oh, so I just wanted to point out how fantastical is this keepers dwelling.
It's if you think about having four families in there, I didn't look to see the average size of keepers family, but
it's a pretty good size for if you consider the lighthouse itself as 100 feet tall.
Oh, yeah. Ten stories. That's you know, it's pretty big.
You can see the windows are arranged in a way that makes me think there's a center wall.
So it's like a duplex. It was split up.
But I don't know if it was split up into four or if it was split up into two.
And then they shared like maybe one side shared a living room and a kitchen and another side shared a living room and a kitchen.
I don't know. I don't know. I think that would be a lot more.
It's at least split down the middle. Pretty sure.
Because otherwise the windows wouldn't make sense there. Right. Cool.
Yeah, it is a really nice house.
They also built a fog signal building in 1871.
So it took them a year to get around to it.
And it was a 12 inch steam whistle that was right on the tip of the point.
And so naturally after it was I think it was like 20 years or something.
It was just barely connected to the point.
It was just all of that had been eaten away and it was just fairly connected.
So they had to demo that and build a new one that was see.
I didn't put it, but they had to build a new one.
Not on the cliff anymore. No. Yeah.
Yeah, they brought it back back towards the lighthouse.
As you can guess by the location of our lighthouse in California,
earthquakes were a common problem. Yep. Yeah.
The San. 1904 or 1906. 1906.
Is it San Andreas? San Andreas fault? San Andreas. San Andreas.
It was just east of here.
And the first keeper's log note of an earthquake was in 1880.
There's another one in 1887 and 1898.
And the keeper said his room shivered, which I.
It's terrifying. Yes.
Like you don't think of shiver just like, oh, it trembled.
It's like shiver is a very, very fast, sharp movement.
Can you imagine your room moving like that?
Oh, it'd be terrifying.
In 18. OK, so then April 18th, 1906,
we have the earthquake that we've talked about a couple of times.
San Francisco plus all of California. Yeah.
All the way up to Alaska. Right. Yes. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.
Insane. Awful. Really awful.
And so this was the keepers log that they wrote about it.
Quote, a heavy blow struck the tower from the south.
The blow came quick and heavy, accompanied by a heavy report.
The tower quivered for a few seconds, went far over to the north.
And then came back and then swung north again, repeating this several times.
Immediately after came rapid and violent vibrations, running the tower apart,
the sections grinding and grading upon each other while the lenses, reflectors,
et cetera, in the lantern room were shaken from their settings
and fell in a shower upon the tower floor.
Like that is horrible. Sounds expensive.
And you think about this, he's not in his his keepers dwelling,
hanging out with his family.
He's in the fricking tower while this is going down.
So what can I do? I know he's got pieces of a lantern coming down all around.
And he's like, I wonder what you do.
Like, I would just be hugging the wall. Yeah.
So Suffice suffice to say that the tower took considerable damage from this earthquake.
They actually kept the light on and running until daybreak.
But then at that point, they saw that the earthquake had basically destroyed the lighthouse.
There was yeah, there's cracks all the way up the sides.
And so they did a they came over and did an inspection and realized they just had to tear it down.
There was like nothing else they could do to save it.
So, oh, another thing.
A black bear was spooked by this earthquake and went in to the tower, like running blindly,
like went into the tower. Maybe it was the keepers dwelling.
It didn't specify, but into the light station and they had to shoot it.
So I was like, what crazy?
Why would a bear run from the mainland down this point into a building?
Looking for a cave, I guess. Maybe. I don't know.
Why did you have to shoot it?
Well, it's a bear running a rampant.
A bear inside the house. Yeah, difficult with your children.
It's hard to get the broom and shush it outside.
Like, no, no, no, this is not a cave.
Is there like news coverage on that? No.
Picture nothing. Just like, oh, yeah, we're having bear stew.
Oh, you know, as well.
I heard it's delicious.
They probably had bigger things to worry about being like, oh, do I have a job?
Oh, that's terrifying. So the tower was totaled, we'll say.
Yeah. And the house was as well.
Everything was destroyed.
Everything that couldn't be used to rebuild, like, you know, damaged brick and whatever,
they just pushed off the cliff edge into the ocean.
You know, world's largest dumpster. Is that how things used to be?
I think so. Yeah.
What else do you do with it? I guess.
The landfill's the same thing.
I mean, you could use it as rubble or something. Riprap.
That's true. That's true.
Probably actually helped with corrosion for the most miniscule.
The earth corrosion.
Yeah. Well, like the waves, you know, corroding the coast.
With the most miniscule way, you know, these couple of bricks aren't going to change anything.
Yeah, exactly.
After only a couple of months, they built temporary structures for the crew,
the construction crew and the keepers.
And a little wooden tower was built with the old lantern room placed on top.
So it was short, but it was the same dimensions.
This is like the top of the lighthouse.
And they had a temporary second order lens, which started up January 5th, 1907.
So it was a while. Six months? It was out of service?
April. Oh, it was April. Yeah.
April to January. Wow.
So at this point, they kind of got an idea of what earthquakes can do to lighthouses.
And so they planned on building the next lighthouse on this spot to withstand earthquakes,
which is a great idea, in my opinion.
So the lighthouse. Wow.
Wow.
Oh, my gosh.
The Lighthouse Board hired the Concrete Chimney Corporation of San Francisco,
and they make industrial chimneys or smokestacks,
which is why we have the shape of the lighthouse that we do today.
Interesting.
So the way that they constructed the tower to withstand earthquakes is that they
wove iron bars together and they surrounded it with wood, like a frame,
and then they filled that with concrete.
And that's what the lighthouse is made of.
Actually, it was the first lighthouse to ever be built this way.
And I think, I mean, obviously they've...
This one?
Yeah.
They've used this on other lighthouses after this, but it's the first one.
Yeah, the Alcatraz Island, the newer lighthouse that's there, is reinforced concrete.
No way.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, it's like octagonal, I think, or pentagonal.
It's an edged shape, but they talked about because of the same earthquake
and the design that they needed for that.
Yeah. Cool.
And eventually, like while they were building this, as it got taller,
this was before like, I mean, this was still 1907.
And so to get concrete up high enough to pour in, they'd have a mule-powered elevator that pulled...
Poor animals.
I know.
Well, we just used them as tools before, at least we replaced them,
and now they can live happily ever after.
Yeah.
Have you seen how they pour concrete now, like on any job site?
No.
Well, there's several different aspects.
We should probably ask someone who actually knows.
But what I have seen is there's large pump trucks that have elevators, like a crane arm.
Yeah.
And the pump truck has a, you can tell they're revving it up, a large, like diesel-powered engine.
It's like a computer trying to place sims.
Yeah, a computer trying to cool down.
And it pumps it up, and then it comes overhead, and there are men that are standing on the rebar
that they have all set up, and then it comes out like an elephant trunk, basically.
Just all this like spraying concrete.
Oh my gosh.
So they like...
Direct it.
Yeah, they direct the hose around, and then they have people like rake it flat.
At first, try to just set it up.
But that way they can get it all in one monolithic pour.
Monolithic.
Yeah.
I know what I'm talking about.
Big wink.
I know almost nothing.
So this is a rebar concrete tower, one of the first.
I thought smokestacks were bricks, so I was wrong.
Well...
Like the old ones.
They probably were.
They moved to concrete at some point.
Yeah, and then when concrete became a thing, they changed.
Especially in places where there are earthquakes.
Like brick would last anywhere else, it'd be fine.
But if you're, I mean, the lighthouse has proven that brick structures cave in the face of large earthquakes.
Yeah.
Something I mentioned before is the bottom of this lighthouse now has this donut-shaped buttress around the bottom, which is just like a support.
Especially because the lighthouse doesn't have tapered sides, which is normally how a tower supports itself is by being thicker on the bottom, thinner on the top in that tapered shape.
And now since it's straight up, they added this buttress to the bottom, which is actually also a circular-shaped workroom for the keepers.
The bottom?
Mm-hmm.
The base?
Yeah.
Sorry.
What do they do in the workroom?
It's like if you need to polish one of the lens pieces, if you had to take it out and replace it.
Yeah, the little shop area.
Yeah, it's just like little stuff for lighthouse keeping.
They also took the original spiral staircase from the old lighthouse and put it in here.
And since it's a different shape on the inside, and also this one's 115 feet tall, I feel like they had to have changed it somehow.
Yeah.
But.
Yeah.
That'd be interesting to see.
Yeah, I would like to go see.
It's probably a really expensive thing to buy would be a metal staircase.
Mm-hmm, true.
So if they could rework it.
It would be better for everyone.
Cut and weld what they have.
Yeah.
But that's how we got the lighthouse that we have today.
115 feet tall, mostly white with a black lantern room.
I think it's original.
I want to say that's an original lantern room.
It looks old.
Yeah.
In a good way, I guess.
It looks classic.
Yeah.
But the so this tower was built in 1907.
Yes.
Yeah.
1907 was when the temporary tower was built.
With the wood platform.
Yeah, the temporary tower.
And then they started building this one.
And that one was finished September 15th, 1908.
Wow.
That's pretty fast.
Yeah.
It's about a year.
It's still over a year.
It just I can't imagine building that with the technology available.
I know.
They were using mules to lift concrete.
Even today.
Yeah, but today.
Like.
Oh.
Let alone using mules to lift concrete.
Yeah.
It's just daunting.
Yeah.
So at this point, they had a double bullseye Fresnel lens.
Oh my gosh.
Fresnel.
Oh my gosh.
Fresnel.
It's going to be a rough ride.
Fresnel.
Fresnel lens on five gallons of mercury.
So we have another mercury rotating Fresnel lens.
A 160 pound suspended weight that rotated the clockwork mechanism.
And it was every 18 seconds it had one turn of the lens.
Which was extremely fast for normally they just had more bullseyes on the lens.
But this time it was just a double.
So I should do a history buoy on types of Fresnel lenses because I don't have a picture.
Oh, I do have a picture, but there's someone else in the picture that I'm going to talk about later.
So don't ask.
OK, we'll cover it later.
Oh my God.
Anyway, in the background of this picture, you can see the double.
It just means that two bullseyes.
It just means that two bullseye lenses smashed together very close.
So out at sea, you would see two flashes very, very close, but it would still be two distinct flashes and not just one big.
I've never seen that before.
Yeah.
And so you would see a double flash every every six seconds.
And so there were three sides to the Fresnel lens where double bullseye on each side.
18 seconds is a full rotation.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yep.
And it had the the clockwork mechanism had to be rewound every two hours.
Oh, no.
Just awful.
I'm sure that was nice and easy.
Oh, yeah.
Probably just pushing a button, right?
Right.
Exactly.
You just look at it and it just happens.
So we had our lighthouse back in September 15th and after the tower, they focused on building the housing again and this time they build a separate bung.
They said bungalow for each family.
So there was four bungalows.
Very fancy.
Yeah.
Very California of them.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, exactly.
When the Coast Guard took over lighthouses in 1939, they decided to paint all concrete on the tower white.
So let me pull this picture back up.
Oh, it wasn't white before.
The main gallery used to be black and there was no particular reason for why they did that.
I think it was just less work because you have to repaint the lighthouse once a year or at least they used to paint it at least once a year.
And it would have been easier to just paint it all white instead of having to worry about, OK, now we tape off here, make it black.
In 1960, the bungalows were demoed and four single story like, is it barrack?
Yes.
Barracks style houses were built, but the tower was automated 17 years later in 1977, which is pretty late for being an automated lighthouse.
And the light characteristic was changed to what it is today, which is one flash, I think every 15 seconds.
Yeah.
In the 77.
Mm hmm.
So a light beacon was replaced.
Yeah, yeah, they took out the or they didn't they left the Fresnel lens up there, but they didn't use it anymore.
So after that, it's the story of all lighthouses ever.
It starts to become a little bit decrepit.
There's no love, no people, no nothing until a nonprofit takes over and brings life back into the lighthouse.
And that's exactly what happened here as well.
We had the Point Arena Lighthouse Keepers, which is the nonprofit group, obtained a 25 year lease of the lighthouse in 1984.
And then when that ran out, they were granted ownership over the lighthouse.
That's great.
So is it privately owned technically?
Yes, I would I think privately owned by the nonprofit.
Yeah.
So right now, the Foxville building that you can see in this picture is a museum and that's where they moved the first order lens.
So you can see it here, which is part of the attraction of coming to see the lighthouse, as you can see a first order lens.
It's like nine feet tall, six feet wide.
It's just enormous.
I still have not seen a lens in person.
Everyone is insanity that I've been doing this podcast for a year and a half or something and have never climbed a lighthouse.
I've never climbed a lighthouse.
You've been to what? Six lighthouses?
Oh, I've been to like.
In person?
It's funny because some people go to hundreds of lighthouses.
Like.
OK, well most of the people we know have never been to a lighthouse.
That's true.
We are in no coast USA.
Anyway, back to Point Arena.
The four. OK, first of all, something I was going to mention before I move on is this this first order lens is appraised at three point five million dollars.
Oh my God.
Isn't that crazy?
I should look up.
That's insane.
It was in the tower until seventy seven.
Yes. Yeah.
Well, until seventy seven, they changed the optic and no longer use the lens.
But I think it wasn't until they remodeled the lighthouse, which was in like two thousand five or maybe two thousand.
When the lease ended was a six, I think.
The lease ended.
Right before two thousand.
And then they were granted ownership and then they needed grants and stuff to remodel the lighthouse.
But I don't know the exact year. I think it might have been like the 2010s sometime.
OK.
But that's when they moved the lens out of the lighthouse and into the foghorn room so that you could actually see it.
See it without going up.
Nowadays.
A lot of cash.
I know.
You can rent the keepers cottages to stay in.
Nice.
Yes.
And the lantern room is now, they say, an excellent observatory because it's just a bunch of empty space.
It's an empty room and you can also rent out the lantern room for proposals or weddings.
If you decided to elope, they have an elopement package and you can get married at the top of the lighthouse.
Well, I know it's pretty neat.
But you can also have full size weddings here.
You just can't.
It wouldn't be you to.
Yeah, exactly.
They could see you from the ground, though.
Yeah.
You could wave.
Next to the tower is the lintel.
Oh, I think you can see in this picture.
That's what I was talking about.
Keeper Owens found it in the surf when he was.
No way.
Yeah.
When he was keeper at this lighthouse, he found the lintel for the original lighthouse that they dumped off the cliff into the water.
And so now it's on display out there.
You can go take a look at it.
That is cool.
I think I do have a picture of it.
Yeah.
Actually, that's a great point.
Like, where did they where did they dump all the stuff right there?
OK.
Probably still there.
Got it.
Yeah.
So speaking of Keeper Owens, this is someone that Ben mentioned when he told us the story
of seeing this lighthouse.
So William Owens, he went by Bill.
He was the last second keeper.
Sorry.
The last second assistant keeper of this lighthouse and the last first assistant keeper and the
second to last head keeper.
So he was there for quite a few years in different positions.
And then they, you know, axed.
The story of every lighthouse acts one assistant acts in an assistant position.
And then all those left as a head keeper.
So his total service was from 1937 to 1952.
And there was a keeper after him until 1977.
But I didn't find anything on him.
I think he was just a normal lighthouse keeper.
Also, Keeper Owens was the last lighthouse keeper at another California lighthouse.
And something happened there to where it was like a big story or something.
You know, it was made some big story.
I didn't look into it because we're not looking at that lighthouse.
But if I ever do cover it, we'll come back to Keeper Owens.
Probably will.
There's a bunch of stories about Bill at this lighthouse.
He had six daughters, one of them born at this lighthouse.
The rest of them were at other lighthouses because he served at, I think, five different lighthouses.
They had to rescue their cow, Bessie, off of a cliff, like fell down.
Oh, my God.
Get the rope. We got to save Bessie.
Yeah. He also reported seeing a submarine during World War II and called and said there's a submarine.
And they were like, there's no submarines in these waters, so you should go back to sleep.
And it was a submarine.
And a ship got torpedoed because nobody listened to him saying, hey, there's a submarine.
That's crazy.
I know.
Was it German or Japanese?
I don't know. I think it was Japanese.
I guess I don't.
That's madness.
But yeah, it is part of his job, especially during a time of war, to stand up there and keep an eye out for submarines and ships and suspicious activity.
And he points out a submarine and someone goes, no, that's not possible.
What are you doing?
Japan's like way far away, bro.
No, they're not even close to here. There'd be no submarines.
That is crazy.
Yeah. How could you possibly?
I didn't know that happened in World War II.
What?
That any subs were over here on our coast.
Yeah. The torpedoed a schooner, I think that was pronounced, called Amelia.
I don't have any other details about it, but yeah, it was shortly after that just up the coast from where he had spotted them at the lighthouse where you do that.
Maybe it was a whale holding torpedoes and just accidentally set one off.
So unfortunate. Always listen to your lighthouse keepers during a time of war when they say that they see a submarine in the water.
Or Santa Claus.
So his kids wrote stories about growing up in the light station. And these were in the US LHS archives. They're really, really fun to read. I really enjoyed it.
It's just, you always talk about the lighthouse. We always talk about the lighthouse. And then we mention a keeper too.
But you can't go into full depth about their life. And I was telling Vince too that we should do like keeper spotlights where we just like cover the life of one of the keepers that did a bunch of stuff or went to a bunch of lighthouses.
But I always want to just go on and on and on about some keeper, especially like keeper Owens, that his kids all wrote stories. They all have really cool, interesting things.
I love reading about it. So you guys should too. I'm going to put a link in the show notes so you can go to that. It says it's public. So you can, everyone should be able to access.
That's cool. Read about it.
There's also a book called The Last Lighthouse Keeper, The Season, Storms and Shipwrecks of California's Bill Owens by Stuart McDowell.
And these were based on days of interviews between Bill and his wife Isabella. I think it's either Isabelle. I think it's Isabelle.
In the 80s. So they were interviewed and the author used these to write the story of Bill's life.
Ben, our listener, he said that he was exploring this area with his dad in this last December and they got lost on a muddy back road and that they later found out that it was named, this back road was named after Owens.
But I couldn't find it because, you know, Google Maps is not going to have little back roads named. So I couldn't find it. But that was his story that he had to share.
Cool.
So Ben, we hope you enjoyed listening about this lighthouse. He said it was his favorite and that, oh no, I'll post. He took a couple of pictures of the lighthouse while he was hiking around it.
And I forgot to download them so I could show them on here.
But can we just show them here? I'll insert them on YouTube.
Here, I'm going to look at a great picture.
Great photo.
Yeah. Really awesome. Oh, I want to go there so bad. Look how flat that land is.
That is, that's level. Yeah.
That's perfectly in line with the horizon. What am I seeing at the bottom of the image? Is that rock?
I think it's rock with water.
Looks interesting. That's a very pretty photo.
So he sent those in, said that we could use them. So I'll put those in our Instagram so everyone else could see them.
Man, that is flat.
I know. Isn't that crazy? They're probably like, oh, we are definitely putting a lighthouse out here. We don't have to blow up any rock.
So, you know, earlier the picture of the cat that I put up.
Yeah. What's going on with the cat with the mascara on?
There are two guest relations managers at this lighthouse. One is Mina, which is the cat, and one is Tassie, which is a dog.
So if you go to this lighthouse, you can meet the guest relations managers.
I like that.
I got pictures of both. It's necessary that I show them.
Mina as in as a mean cat. Where is it? Nice cat. It looks kind of mean in the photo.
It's a cat. It doesn't have mean faces. Kind of discerning.
I knew you'd say something mean about the cat and then I'm going to pull up the picture of the dog and you're like, oh, so cute.
Yep. If anyone can tell, Vince is a dog guy, strictly with no leeway.
He's got a nice face, like the dark nose.
She's also the rodent control specialist.
She probably kills it out there. Yeah.
And there's a picture of her on their website carrying rats. So that's Mina.
And then we got Tassie. Oh, look at him.
It's a great photo. Is it great? She is also a hard worker.
Yeah, I didn't think so. Looks a lot like the one we know. Beautiful flowers still around. Yep, I know. Awesome.
Looks like a great place to visit. Oh, I so badly want to go.
Oh, there's a picture of Bill Owens as well. Cool photo. The top of the lighthouse.
Looks like it belongs in a cocktail bar. Yeah, it looks like it belongs at Salty Dog Saloon. Awesome pipe.
Look at that thing. Also, this is dubbed the best place in the Northeast to whale watch. Cool.
They have gray whales, humpbacks and killer whales.
And they also have a wind and whale celebration where it's like the best time of year to watch to like watch whales.
They'll like come right up to the side of the lighthouse. And then they have big kites, you know, the ones that are like
open so you can make them into figures and like big kites with like a bunch of different connections.
It's like all kinds of stuff. But so they got a constant sea breeze going on. Definitely. Whale festival.
But yeah, I'm going to post the link to the website for this lighthouse as well.
So if you wanted to rent a keepers dwelling, a keepers cottage to go stay in, you can.
I think it starts like two hundred dollars a night or something. So not bad at all.
Yeah. Do you have any map views of where this is at in California?
So it's north of San Francisco, 100 miles roughly. That's about right. That's awesome.
I think there were two other lighthouses built in the 1870s on this coast up here, I'm assuming also right here.
Yeah. That other you mentioned the land turns north. Yeah. Point area.
So it's basically out straight west of Sacramento, a little bit north Santa Rosa.
That is the point arena lighthouse. Awesome.
Google bringing it in with five stars, four point seven, one thousand one hundred and sixty ratings.
A lot of good reviews. Awesome. Well, thank you for your work today.
Oh, yeah, you bet. Finally getting back to American. You asked Vince.
You're the next episode. You're coming up. So are you doing an American lighthouse? Yes.
Excellent. And these are so fun because Lighthouse friends dot com has information on every lighthouse in the U.S.
And it makes it very easy to research because they do really good work collecting information.
A lot of it's from USLHS archives. It's a great resource for us.
Makes it a lot easier to cover an episode, get a head start. Definitely.
And everyone, please send us voicemails or emails about lighthouses you want us to cover, because we love it so much and it's so much fun.
We just love to hear from our listeners.
And it's easy to talk about lighthouses that other people are interested in for sure.
And it's like if we do an episode for a listener, it's more fun than just doing it for ourselves.
Oh, yeah. If you're brave enough, send us a voicemail.
Tell us about your favorite lighthouse. Tell us what your favorite episode is. Talk about how your morning went.
It doesn't matter. Please tell us about your breakfast.
Yeah, that's at the lighthouse lowdown dot com.
You can also follow us on Instagram at the lighthouse lowdown.
And we're on LinkedIn. We're on YouTube. All of those links are available through our website as well.
The website's really the place to be talking about potentially doing some merchandise.
Yes. Future for giveaways and or sales to help support the show.
Yeah. So if you have any interest there, let us know. Send us a voicemail.
Send us a voicemail. We hope you enjoyed listening and we will catch you next time on the lighthouse lowdown.
It has to be a little early.