Frankfort's pier light, the tower that moved by barge

Walk to the end of Main Street in Frankfort, out past the beach, and a long concrete pier runs into Lake Michigan with a squat steel tower at the tip. That lighthouse has stood guard over the harbor mouth since 1912 — but not on this spot. It started life on the old north pier, closer to shore, marking the channel into Betsie Lake.

In the early 1930s the Army Corps of Engineers reshaped the whole harbor entrance, throwing out two long concrete breakwaters in an arrowhead to make a sheltered mouth. That left the old piers, and the light on them, with nothing useful to do. Rather than scrap a perfectly good tower, the crews simply moved it. On August 8, 1932, they loaded the steel lighthouse and its fog signal onto a scow, floated it out to the end of the new north breakwater, and bolted it down on a steel base built to catch it.

So the building you photograph today is older than its perch — a 1912 tower riding a 1932 breakwater, hauled into place by barge like a piece of furniture. It kept a keeper for years, was eventually automated, and in 2011 ownership passed to the City of Frankfort, which now looks after it.

It is one of the most-shot lighthouses on this coast, partly because the pier walk out to it is so easy and partly because of where it points. Stand at its base at sundown and you are looking straight down the lake toward Wisconsin, the same line the old car ferries took out of neighboring Elberta for a hundred years.