The Lighthouse Looks Back
- Ornamentum
- Mar 30
- 7 min read
by Kate Bauer
CANADIANS, AND PEOPLE WHO VISIT CANADA, LIKE TO LOOK AT LIGHTHOUSES. Canada Post delivery vans zipping around the country’s cities have a panoramic photograph of Peggy’s Cove–the most photographed lighthouse in the country–plastered on their back doors. Gift shops from Twillingate to Tobermory to Tofino sell lighthouse souvenirs. Photography books, stained glass window hangings, and Christmas ornaments in the shape of white towers with red tops are popular mementos from a trip to the coast. Locals in lighthouse places, like Brighton, Ontario or Campobello Island, New Brunswick proudly display lighthouse-shaped mailboxes, address markers, and lawn ornaments, often handmade by nearby carpenters in the likeness of their local tower. Though their keepers are long gone, lighthouses remain an iconic part of the coastline.
Viewing them from land is a new way of looking at lighthouses. It is easy to forget that not long ago the sight of a lighthouse served a far more significant purpose. Since the first light was lit in Louisbourg, New France in 1734, towers built on Canadian shores guided mariners through darkness, storms, and fog. At its peak around the Second World War, the lighthouse system boasted close to 1800 towers and structures tended by keepers on waterways both fresh and salty. For a country tasked with lighting the longest coastline in the world, Canada had to make critical decisions about where to build lights. Towers appeared in high-risk places, where enough ship traffic encountered particularly hazardous coasts. Wrecks, like that of the steamship Valencia on the coast of Vancouver Island in January 1906, brought calls from local politicians, businesses, and citizens for more and better lights from coast to coast to coast.
What a lighthouse looked like was important. The Lighthouse Board, a supervisory body composed of politicians and shipping interests, debated in the 1920s about which shade of red paint best highlighted a lighthouse cupola against the surrounding landscape.(1) Daymarks, the striped or crossed patterns of paint on lighthouse towers, made each tower distinctive to inform the mariner about their location on the coast. One of the most important parts of the lighthouse keeper’s job description was keeping their tower painted—a relentless battle against wind, salt, and storms that peeled strips and shingles off towers perched on exposed stretches of the shore.
Striking as they are in the daylight, lighthouse towers served their true purpose at night: to house the lights that guided ships to safety in the darkness. By the nineteenth century, advancements in optical science set a new standard for the illumination apparatuses at lighthouses around the world. French physicist Augustin Fresnel developed a bulb-shaped lens, fitted around a light source, that used a combination of refraction and reflection to intensify and concentrate light waves which increased their visibility at greater distances. In clear conditions, only the curvature of the earth itself could obscure the intensity of Fresnel’s strongest lenses.(2) The Canadian government purchased and installed hundreds of these glass apparatuses in towers across Canada. After the Second World War, the system underwent a modernization and electrification program. Smaller illuminating apparatuses, like the DCB-10 beacon, replaced Fresnel lenses. While many are preserved in museums around the country, most of these heavy glass lenses were left behind or smashed when Coast Guard technicians arrived to electrify the station. The only first order Fresnel lens–an immense, rippling glass bulb weighing 20 tons–still at work in Canada rotates in a mercury bath atop the lighthouse at Cape Race, Newfoundland.(3)
The job of the lighthouse keeper also began to change. By the 1970s, developments in on-board navigational tools like radar shifted the focus away from lighthouses as the primary visual aid to navigation. That same decade, Canada proposed and began to implement a sweeping nationwide program to replace lighthouse keepers with fog sensors, electric lights, diesel generators, and a remote monitoring system. No longer, they argued, were people needed to turn on the light and the foghorn. The plan faced delays in much of the country, but the Coast Guard (now responsible for Canada’s lighthouses) successfully automated and destaffed hundreds of stations in the Maritimes and Great Lakes by the early 1980s.
In some parts of the country, however, the plan did not unfold as the Coast Guard hoped. When the lightkeepers in British Columbia caught wind of the decision to eliminate their positions in the spring of 1986, they responded by organizing into the country’s first and only lightkeepers’ union. The BC Lightkeepers Union launched a fiery campaign that unified politicians, the media, and the public against the staff cuts. In its intention to replace keepers with machines, the Coast Guard misunderstood the role human vision played in ensuring safe navigation. Mariners didn’t just look at lighthouses. The keepers, too, looked back. Lighthouse keeper Barry Porter recalls the time he spent gazing at the sea during his time on the lights in Newfoundland: “The longer I looked, the more I realized there was more to observe. It was a never-ending performance, every hour, every day. If it floated or if it moved on the ocean, I have observed it from a lighthouse.”(4) Peering through binoculars from their stations, they watched passing traffic, radioed real-time weather conditions, and scanned the horizon for mariners in distress. Losing the keepers, the union argued, would eliminate the role that looking played in countless life-saving episodes on the rugged Pacific shore.
Myriad dramatic rescue tales, many now the stuff of local legend, owe their happy endings to the vigilance of Canada’s lightkeepers. George Collins, the lightkeeper at Nottawasaga Island in Georgian Bay spotted the steamship Mary Ward foundering on a nearby shoal in November 1872. As day turned to night and calm weather whipped into a storm, George and his son Charles set out in a lifeboat to rescue passengers clinging to the ship as the waves slowly broke its hull apart.(5) Lifesaving stories about lighthouse keepers are part of coastal lore on every edge of the country. Surprisingly, search and rescue operations have never been a part of the lightkeeper’s official job description. Keepers like George Collins and his son acted to save lives, sometimes putting their own at risk, because it was the right thing to do. As former keeper and author Chris Mills puts it: “All lightkeepers were lifesavers on those occasions of dire necessity when vessels went down in nearby waters.”(6)
This watchfulness, officially unsanctioned, played a powerful role in the marine community’s sense of safety at sea for hundreds of years. By the 1990s, however, mariners in much of the country cast their gaze downward at their on-board GPS screens rather than at lighthouses. Keepers began to seem superfluous to safe navigation. In Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, stations were shuttered with little fanfare. Yet on the country’s two most extreme edges, this change was not so easily accepted. In British Columbia and in Newfoundland, alike in the perilousness of their coastlines, the loss of keen eyes on remote and rugged shores presented a much more immediate threat to safety. Judith Schweers, assistant keeper at Langara Point Lightstation, BC summarized the community’s feeling: “No machine has yet been designed that can scan the horizon as well as these seven-day-a-week lampies. No technological trinket has ever been able to work as well as those God made.”(7)
Hundreds of letters and hours of testimony at automation hearings in both provinces reveal just how important the visual work of keepers is to those who make a living on the water. By the mid-1990s, the issue became so contentious that the Coast Guard rescinded its destaffing plans, leaving the keepers to continue their vigil on both coasts’ dark shores.
Today, fifty lighthouses remain staffed in British Columbia and Newfoundland (and one on New Brunswick’s Machias Seal Island purely for sovereignty purposes).(8) Every few years, their keepers must defend their jobs from budget cuts, and so far they have succeeded. The most recent attempt to shutter stations at Pachena and Carmanah points on Vancouver Island in August 2024 met with the usual unified resistance from the BC Lightkeepers Union, though the fate of the two stations remains uncertain.(9)
Left: Cape Forchu lighthouse miniature // Right: Author Kate Bauer at Cape Forchu lighthouse, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia
Very few are aware that there are still working lighthouse keepers in Canada. Few staffed sites are accessible to the public. Most visitors to popular stations, like Peggy’s Cove, see only the empty towers, their former keepers with their watchful eyes resigned to a fading, romantic past. We buy handpainted miniature lighthouses that feature no handpainted figures, and the white and red towers sink into the photogenic coastal landscape.
Canadians, and people who visit Canada, like to look at lighthouses, but we forget that it was the lighthouses that long looked out for us.
Kate Bauer is a PhD candidate and lighthouse historian. Her forthcoming dissertation looks at the emergence and transformation of the Canadian lighthouse system from Confederation to the passing of the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act in 2008. While she finds it hard to choose, her favourite lighthouse (and lighthouse miniature) is Cape Forchu in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
This article appears in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Ornamentum magazine. To purchase the issue or subscribe, head to our store.
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Endnotes
Lighthouse Board of Canada Minute Books, Library and Archives Canada, RG42 1996-97/016 GAD.
Theresa Levitt, A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse, 1st edition. (New York: WWNorton & Company, 2013).
Katie Breen, “The special Cape Race lighthouse lens is one of only a dozen left in the world,” CBC News, 2 January 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/cape-race-lighthouse-1.5412574
Barry Porter, Adventures of a Lightkeeper (St. John’s: Flanker Press Limited, 2022).
Andrea Gutsche, Alone in the Night: Lighthouses of Georgian Bay, Manitoulin Island and the North Channel, 1st ed. (Toronto: Lynx Images, 1996).
Chris Mills, Vanishing Lights: A Lightkeeper’s Fascination with a Disappearing Way of Life (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1992).
“Lightstations: People Want People on the Lights” (Ottawa: Ad Hoc Parliamentary Committee on Lightstations, June 1995), page 50.
Kate Bauer, “Of Lobsters and Lighthouses: Searching for Sovereignty at Machias Seal Island,” Network in Canadian History & Environment, 20 August 2020. https://niche-canada.org/2020/08/20/of-lobsters-and-lighthouses-searching-for-sovereignty-at-machias-seal-island/
Becca Clarkson, “B.C. lightkeepers’ jobs in jeopardy as coast guard plans to automate 2 stations,” CTV News Vancouver, 16 September 2014. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/british-columbians-rally-to-keep-lightkeepers-at-2-stations-along-west-coast-trail-1.7040000
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