Why Marquette's harbor light is painted red

The lighthouse on the point in Marquette is the color of a fire engine, and the paint is the youngest thing about it. The brick tower under it has been standing since 1866 — the oldest building of any real importance in the whole city.

There was a light here even earlier. The first one went up in 1853, four years after Marquette incorporated, but it was thrown together so poorly that it had to be torn down and rebuilt within thirteen years. The 1866 replacement is the one still on the point: a story-and-a-half brick keeper’s dwelling with a square tower built right into its gable end, fitted with a fourth-order Fresnel lens to throw the beam out over Lake Superior. The red coat came much later, in 1965, which is part of why the place looks unlike any other light on the lake.

It still does its job. The beacon guides freighters loaded with iron ore into the harbor, the same cargo that gave Marquette a reason to exist in the first place. A light marking the entrance to an ore port is a tidy little summary of the whole town.

In 2002 the Marquette Maritime Museum signed a thirty-year lease with the Coast Guard for the lighthouse and the two and a half acres of Lighthouse Point around it. The museum runs guided tours up the point in the warm months, and keeps a collection of Fresnel lenses inside its own building down the hill. You climb the same stairs the keepers did, look out the lantern room at the same gray water, and the freighters are still coming in.