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Michigan volunteer lighthouse keeper11/6/2023 In many cases, the Coast Guard maintains the lights but doesn’t have a budget to care for the structures, so local nonprofits, federal agencies like the National Park Service or private citizens step up to purchase or manage them. There are just under 800 lighthouses currently standing in the U.S., a number that can slightly fluctuate depending on a person’s definition of “lighthouse.” (Some counts include unofficial lights, meaning they’ve never been listed as Coast Guard navigational aids and are more like sculptural pieces, such as the Robert Manning Memorial Lighthouse in Empire, Michigan.) According to D’Entremont, about half of these lighthouses are active. lighthouses that offer “volunteer keeper” programs tend to get booked up months, if not years, in advance. They’ve got hundreds of years of history, and they tend to exist in some really beautiful and dramatic places.” ![]() (North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras Lighthouse alone has approximately 500,000 visitors per year.) “Lighthouses were built for nothing but altruistic reasons, helping to aid navigation and to save lives and property. “I call it catching the lighthouse bug,” says Jeremy D’Entremont, historian for the United States Lighthouse Society, referring to the reasons millions of people visit U.S. Yet I felt secure standing beside the fifth-order Fresnel lens, a beacon that once shone up to 13 miles from the lantern deck atop Mission Point Lighthouse, lighting the way for many lost sailors. ![]() ![]() Strange really, since these cold, deep waters are home to dozens of well-preserved shipwrecks, vessels from the late 1800s and early 1900s that became the victims of unpredictable storms while shipping lumber and other maritime commerce. Looking out over the west arm of Grand Traverse Bay, a part of Lake Michigan, I felt a sense of calm.
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