Crisp Point: The Light That Was Nearly Lost to the Lake

On a wild, storm-battered stretch of Lake Superior known as the “Shipwreck Coast,” far out in the eastern Upper Peninsula, stands a lighthouse that very nearly fell into the lake it was built to guard.

This coast, between Munising and Whitefish Point, was so deadly to ships in thick fog and sudden gales that the government built a string of life-saving stations here in the 1870s. One of them took its name from a famously tough keeper, Christopher Crisp. A lighthouse followed at Crisp Point in 1904. But after it was retired and its buildings mostly torn down in the 1960s, the lonely tower was left to the elements — and Lake Superior began clawing the ground out from under it.

Then came an unlikely rescue. A retired Ohio couple who liked to snowmobile the U.P. stumbled on the crumbling light and refused to let it die, founding a historical society in 1991. Even so, a 1996 storm dropped part of the building into the lake, and Crisp Point landed on a global list of the most endangered lighthouses. Volunteers hauled in some 1,000 cubic yards of stone to armor the shoreline and save the tower. They rebuilt what was lost, and in 2013 — for the first time in two decades — they switched the light back on.