The little Grosse Ile lighthouse the island bought to save

The white wooden tower near the north end of Grosse Ile looks almost too small to matter, and that’s exactly why it’s still here. It started in 1894 as one of a pair of range lights — two lamps set at different distances that, lined up, told a ship’s captain he was safely in the channel running past the island. The original 1894 tower was a spindly thing perched on a frame, and crews rebuilt it on a solid concrete base in 1906, giving it the octagonal wooden shape that stands today.

Range lights work in pairs, but the back light of this one was switched off in 1917, leaving just the front tower to keep watch over the river traffic. It did that job until 1963, when the Coast Guard decommissioned it — after nearly 70 years of guiding boats through, the light was no longer needed.

That’s usually where a small lighthouse’s story ends: abandoned, then rotted or torn down. Grosse Ile went the other way. In 1965 the township bought the tower from the federal government for $350, using money raised by the Grosse Ile Historical Society, which took on keeping it standing. Restoration work shored up the foundation and the structure, and the old light was even switched back on as a private aid to navigation. The society still opens it to visitors one weekend each fall — the only time the public gets inside.

Getting onto the island has its own quirk: you cross either the privately run Grosse Ile Toll Bridge, open to cars since 1913, or the county’s “Free Bridge,” a former railroad span the county opened to traffic in 1931. Either way, you end up on Michigan’s largest river island — home to a small wooden lighthouse the neighbors simply refused to lose.