Shedding light on an old tower

A school field trip happened upon the site where a team from the University was excavating an old lighthouse last month. U-M students explained to those on the field trip that the team had discovered a brick wall underground that was still intact and a rubble wall that surrounded it.

(Above) Heather Rejto and Bradley Krueger, both juniors who are participating in the Summer Field Training Institute, and Meghan Howey, a doctoral student in anthropological archaeology and a field institute assistant instructor, map the location of the old lighthouse and the site of the original keeper's house. (Below) Professor John O'Shea and his team uncovered the intact interior wall of the lighthouse and the surrounding outer rubble wall. The intact brick floor of the lighthouse also was exposed. (Photos by Museum Of Anthropology)

Nobody had stood on the floor for about 150 years, the students from U-M said. The younger students instantly grasped the importance of this archaeological find.

"The school kids applauded," says John O'Shea, professor of anthropology and curator of Great Lakes archaeology at the Museum of Anthropology.

O'Shea and his team of students from the U-M Summer Field Training Institute were just as excited about the discovery. They had gone to the Leelanau State Park near Northport to excavate the site of the original 1852 Grand Traverse Light state tower. Built by order of President Millard Fillmore, the lighthouse quickly was deemed inadequate and replaced by a larger lighthouse in 1858. The old site is just west of the 1858 Grand Traverse Light.

The team members knew approximately where to locate the original site and suspected they would find some portions of the old lighthouse base. But finding the inner brick wall still intact was "better than anybody was expecting," O'Shea says.

The team—O'Shea, six undergraduates, two graduate assistants and one graduate student volunteer—also measured the foundation of the old keeper's house to help determine whether the structure is one that now sits on another property in Northport, as many locals believe.

The findings at the old lighthouse thrilled Stefanie Staley, executive director of the Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum. She had expected stone and rubble and instead was able to see the inside of the tower's base. She and Sally Frye, museum vice president, stood on the floor.

"We were ecstatic," she says. "They did a fantastic job," she says of O'Shea and his team.

Due to the guidelines of the Department of Natural Resources permit, the team had to refill the site when they were done. To preserve the bricks, O'Shea says, they put plastic against the walls, then filled the hole with clean sand. They topped that with a layer of rubble.

Staley hopes the site can become part of a museum exhibit, but such an endeavor wouldn't happen for many years, she says. In the meantime, she and Frye still will have a connection to the old lighthouse: Both of them put their nametags at the bottom of the old tower before team members refilled it.

In the fall, the team will produce a report and topographic maps for the project.

For more information about the lighthouse, visit http://www.grandtraverselighthouse.com/ or http://www.cr.nps.gov/maritime/light/grandtra.htm.