The fog-signal apparatus was relocated 125 feet to the new structure and the former characteristic of a five-second blast of the whistle uttered at intervals of twenty-five seconds was retained. In 1895, the present fog signal building was constructed to replace the original one, which, thanks to erosion, was now connected to the rest of the station by a narrow tongue of land and was in danger of being destroyed. Water for the fog signal and the inhabitants of the station was pumped from a spring by a windmill and then stored in a tank and delivered through a galvanized iron pipe.Īs noted in the Annual Report of the Lighthouse Board for 1883, the station was “located on a projecting point, the outer face of which is on an almost perpendicular bluff, made peculiarly dangerous by the liability of sudden caving near the edge of the earth overlying the sand-rock.” During the previous year, one of the laborers working on an addition to the fog signal building fell over the bluff and was drowned, prompting the Lighthouse Board to have a 1,400-foot-long picket-fence built around the station’s buildings to prevent another accident. The other two towers, built in a similar style, were constructed at Pigeon Point and Piedras Blancas.Ĭongress appropriated funds for a first-class steam fog signal at Point Arena on March 3, 1871, and a twelve-inch steam whistle housed in a building close to the tip of the point commenced operation on November 25, 1871. On May 1, 1870, Point Arena Lighthouse became the first of three tall coastal towers in California to commence service during the 1870s. Near the base of the tower, a large two-and-a-half-story, brick dwelling was built to house four keepers and their families. The lighthouse stood 100 feet tall and a fixed, first-order Fresnel lens was installed in the lantern room to produce a light at a height of 150 feet above the ocean. On September 18, 1869, the lighthouse and other buildings were seven feet above the ground, and the project was completed the following April. Three kilns were burned near the point to fire roughly 500,000 bricks needed for the work, while an additional 114,000 bricks of superior quality were shipped from San Francisco to build the outside courses of the tower. The excavations for the foundations of the tower, oil-house, and dwelling were commenced the next day and finished during the month of August derricks were erected to hoist stones from the beach, sand was hauled, stones for concrete broken, and the concrete foundations laid, and a flume to conduct water to the site constructed. On July 30th, …the workmen with all the necessary tools, together with a quantity of cement and lime, reached the Point. The exact site selected for the tower is three hundred and seventy feet from the extremity of the point, and that for the dwelling is fifty feet in rear of the tower. The stone is not suitable for building purposes. It is composed of an argillaceous stone, the exposed bluff surface of which, acted upon by the weather, is much cracked, exhibiting a dip considerably to the horizon. The ground is nearly horizontal, and bounded on the water side by a nearly vertical bluff of fifty feet in height from the water surface. The Point itself is a narrow peninsula forming a plateau from two hundred to three hundred feet in width, for a length of eight hundred feet in an easterly direction, when it suddenly widens. The Annual Report of the Lighthouse Board describes the work on the lighthouse that began during the summer of 1869: Here, the coast changes from running in a northwesterly direction to more of a northerly direction, and as ship traffic carrying redwood lumber from Northern California to San Francisco increased in the 1850s and 1860s, so did the need for a light to mark this critical turning point.
Known by early explorers as Punta Barro de Arena, Spanish for Sand Bar Point, the feature is now known simply as Point Arena. When traveling north from Point Reyes, the next prominent point along the California coast is reached after sixty-eight miles.
0 kommentar(er)
