Lighthouses Again Brightening Lake Champlain

For almost 150 years, a squat, cast-iron lighthouse has stood on a bluff overlooking the northern end of Lake Champlain a short sail from the Canadian border.

The 10-sided light atop the 30-foot tower used to guide barges carrying lumber and paper or passenger steamships.

It’s been dark for almost three-quarters of a century. In 1933, the job of guiding lake traffic was handed off to a nearby light that until recently flashed from dark until dawn atop a steel tower.

But the light room at the top of the lighthouse is flashing again, as is another lighthouse that once cast a signal to mariners from its 19th-century light. Others on the lake are being relighted too.

“We are keeping the signal for the mariner and putting some history back onto Lake Champlain,” said Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer David Waldrip, who oversees 134 lighthouses from the Canadian border to New Jersey.

Relighting the historic Lake Champlain houses involves more than sentimentality. “It’s going to be a huge savings for the taxpayer,” he said.

That’s because owners of the lighthouses will be responsible for upkeep of the buildings while the Coast Guard only maintains the lighting apparatus inside the top section of the tower.

The first Lake Champlain lighthouse was relighted in August in Alburg. A light atop a 1933 steel structure, known as a skeleton tower, was returned to the adjacent 1858 lighthouse at Windmill Point, about five miles north of Isle La Motte and just south of the Canadian border.

It’s a vindication of sorts for Lucky Clark, who owns the lighthouses at Isle La Motte and Alburg, and his son, Rob. The two have spent a lifetime maintaining the lighthouses when they were nothing more than government surplus property.

“Evidently, way in the back of my mind, I said, ‘Someday, people are going to like these things,’ ” said Lucky Clark, 84, a retired purchasing manager from Champlain, N.Y. His father bought the Isle La Motte lighthouse in 1949. He bought Windmill Point in 1963.

Clark was right.

“The visible monuments to maritime history are these lighthouses that are visible today. Now that they are going to have the lights back in them, they’ll be able to celebrate it that much more,” said George Clifford of Plattsburgh, N.Y., who wrote “Lake Champlain Lighthouses.”

When it was last painted, the 1857 Isle La Motte lighthouse, made of cast iron, was orange, but the sun has faded it to a mottled pink. The Windmill Point lighthouse is blue limestone, quarried on Isle La Motte.

Clark’s sister lives in the lightkeeper’s home at Isle La Motte. The Windmill Point home is vacant and being renovated.

On a late summer morning, the only traffic on the lake off Isle La Motte were a couple of fishing boats anchored in the passage between Vermont and New York.

It’s very different from a century and a half ago when the 120-mile lake was one of the most important commercial waterways in North America.

Lake Champlain, thanks to a barge canal and the Richelieu River, linked the Hudson and St. Lawrence rivers. In 1875, Burlington was the third-largest lumber port in the country. The lighthouse at Isle La Motte helped guide the lumber barges.

In the 1920s, the U.S. Lighthouse Bureau started abandoning kerosene lamps, which needed constant tending, in favor of steel towers. Kerosene eventually gave way to acetylene, then electricity.

Today, about 80 years after the government started abandoning lighthouses, the skeleton towers that replaced them are reaching the end of their lives. In many places, the Coast Guard is replacing skeleton towers with aluminum towers. It would cost up to $100,000 to refurbish each skeleton tower or $50,000 to replace each. The Coast Guard estimates the cost of relighting Windmill Point and Isle La Motte at $5,000 to $10,000.

Lucky Clark bought the Windmill Point lighthouse after stumbling into the owner while walking on the point with his family. Over the years, both Clarks have spent their free time tinkering on the lighthouses, fixing the foundation on Isle La Motte, replacing the glass if it broke, anything to protect them from the elements.

For years, their work was a curiosity. But, about 1975, the public began to sense the mystique of lighthouses. Gradually, the Clarks started thinking about relighting them.

Over the years, they had informal correspondence with Coast Guard officials who were as enamored of lighthouses as they were, but the Clarks never formally suggested moving the light back into the tower.

But last summer, while the Clarks were working on the Windmill Point lighthouse, a Coast Guardsman stuck his head through the hedge and asked the way in. That discussion led to the idea of moving the light from the tower on Windmill Point back into the lighthouse.

What followed were plans to relight Isle La Motte and houses in New York state on Cumberland Head, just outside Plattsburgh; on Valcour Island and at Split Rock, near Essex, N.Y.

Since Windmill Point and Isle La Motte were in good shape, little needed to be done, and Rob Clark took on much of it himself. The Clarks installed a Coast Guard-supplied solar panel that charges the batteries for the optics. That light was also supplied by the Coast Guard.

Father and son estimate that they spent $400 on supplies and more than 400 hours getting their lighthouses ready.

Windmill Point was relighted Aug. 7, National Lighthouse Day, and Isle La Motte on Oct. 5.