Menominee's red lighthouse, lit on New Year's Day 1877

A fixed red light first burned at the end of Menominee’s north pier on January 1, 1877 — a New Year’s Day beacon for the schooners and steamers crowding the river mouth in the white-pine years. The tower is small and easy to miss at first. It is an octagonal cast-iron shell, the kind the lighthouse service stamped out for harbors all over the Great Lakes back then. What you notice from a distance is the color. It wears a bright red coat, a black lantern up top, and a white base, and it has carried that red scheme since around 1917.

The light moved around as the harbor changed. Engineers rebuilt and extended the piers more than once. In 1927 the federal engineers set the tower on a concrete base and replaced the old wooden pier with concrete. The Coast Guard ran it from 1939 until 2002. They automated it in 1972 and pulled the metal catwalk off the pier, since no keeper needed to walk out to it anymore.

Then it nearly became an orphan, the way a lot of small working lighthouses did once nobody lived in them. In 2008 the City of Menominee took it over from the Coast Guard. With help from a private donor, the city has fixed up the site and kept it open for the public to walk out and see. The light still works — an active aid to navigation, not just a photo op.

Stand at the end of the pier on a clear evening and you get the whole geography in one look: the river on one side, the wide open water of Green Bay on the other, and a 150-year-old red tower still doing the one job it was built for.