Tawas Point Lighthouse by midmichphotos

This photo is one of a set of lighthouse photos. According to Terry Pepper’s Seeing the Light (which also has a stunning photo of the Tawas light in the 1800s) nothing came easy for those who sought to establish an aid to navigation of Ottawa Point at one end of Tawas Bay on Lake Huron. By the 1870s, scant years after construction of the first light on the point:

By virtue of the prevailing Northeast wind, Ottawa Point had forever been in a state of evolution. Driven by wave and wind, sand from the lake-bed and the shoreline was continually deposited onto the end of the Point, changing its configuration. Over the years since the construction of the Light, this natural reshaping had continued unabated, lengthening the Point by almost a mile, and leaving the old lighthouse “high and dry,” three quarters of a mile from the end of the point it was designed to mark. Additionally, the light had a reputation among mariners as being extremely dim and difficult to see from out in the Lake. The combination of the dimness of the light and its distance from the Point represented a disaster waiting to happen.

Read on for the rest of the story. You can get directions to the light and information about nearby attractions from Michigan.gov and information about Tawas State Park from the DNR. You might also want to check this map of the location of the Tawas Point Lighthouse (and see some other pics taken there).