Researching Lighthouse Logs Brings the Past to Life for Cynthia Baker
By Karen Gould

Lighthouse keeper George Marshall and his dog in 1915. (Mackinac State Historic Parks photograph)

At her dining room table, Cynthia Baker looks up from neatly arranged charts, papers, and a well-worn leather book and peers out the lighthouse window at Lake Huron, much like George W. Marshall might have 100 years ago. Mr. Marshall was the first lighthouse keeper of Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse in Mackinaw City, and Ms. Baker is a present day volunteer.

She enjoys deciphering the log books Mr. Marshall was required to maintain in his position as head lighthouse keeper at Mackinaw for the U.S. Lighthouse Service.

"It kind of just puts you back in time," she said.

Ms. Baker volunteered as a lighthouse interpreter two years ago, at the request of her nephew, Bill Fritz, the conservator for Mackinac State Historic Parks, which now operates Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse as a living history museum. [Editor's Note: Mr. Fritz has passed away since this story was written. He died March 28.]

For reference, Mackinac Associates' volunteer Cnythia Baker uses maps and a history book from the late 1800s when she works on lighthouse logs written by keeper George Marshall.

The lighthouse began as a fog station in 1890 and a light was added in 1892. At that time, Mr. Marshall was its first keeper and remained until 1919, when he passed it on to his son, James. He had nine assistants over the years.

The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1957, the same year the Mackinac Bridge was opened.

Log entries can be viewed on the Mackinac State Historic Parks Web site and visitors to the Web page can learn about weather conditions and read about ships that passed through the Straits in 1907.

Mr. Marshall's original log books are housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and copies are kept at the park's Peterson Center in Mackinaw City, awaiting Ms. Baker's deciphering skills.

Before she puts her pen to paper, Ms. Baker does a quick read of the log, working in onemonth increments.

In 2005, when she first began the project, reading and understanding the logs took more time than it does now that she has become familiar with Mr. Marshall's handwriting and learned some of the words that were commonly used then. Mr. Marshall either used all-capital letters in his reports or cursive writing, and sometimes his assistants made entries. There is no punctuation, so it was difficult to determine where one thought stops and the next one starts.

Taken in 1908, this view from the west shows Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse and the fog signal. (Mackinac State Historic Parks photograph)

Now, Ms. Baker can decipher a month of logs in less than an hour, depending on the clarity of the printing and the number of references made to equipment. The entries had a pattern. The first remarks were about the weather conditions, then what was going on that day, and Mr. Marshall ended the entry by noting the other navigational lights he could see. He would include the barometer reading.

"I go through and read it as quickly as I can, hoping words fall into place," she said. "If I have any words I wonder about, I go through and put a check mark by them. If I really feel stuck, I let it rest a day."

Sometimes it just clicks when she takes a second look.

"It's fun to do," she said of her translations. "There's always a challenge to it."

She said the hardest part of interpreting the entries is understanding the machinery and equipment parts, many of them not familiar today, like "baffle" and "fresh." Baffle was another word for wind, and fresh refers to wind speed.

"A fresh wind is a 20-knot wind," she said.

Ships heading up were going west and those heading down were going east.

"The log was strictly business," she said. "He never mentioned family."

In August 1905, Governor Fred Warner came through the region with U.S. Vice President Charles Fairbanks. The men were on their way to Sault Ste. Marie. A few months earlier, on April 11, a log entry mentioned a ship's captain stopping at the lighthouse to check on ice conditions in the Straits. The entry noted that four vessels were stuck in the ice. Another entry on April 19 recorded that ships were moving again as the ice broke up.

A book on the history of the Great Lakes, written in 1899, that Ms. Baker purchased at a garage sale, helps her identify the ships Mr. Marshall names, and she notes that many of the vessels of the era were named after flowers, like the Dahlia, Marigold, and Hyacinth.

In his log entries, Mr. Marshall often noted the visibility of lights from nearby lighthouses.

"He would see St. Helena and McGulpin Point lighthouse, Round Island, and Graham Gas Buoy, which was southeast of St. Ignace," she said. From her reading, Ms. Baker has learned that the Round Island and McGulpin Point provided sailors with fixed white lights, while Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse was a flashing red light. As winter weather set in, Mr. Marshall would see fewer and fewer lights. Shortly before the ice began to form, buoys would be taken out of the water, ship traffic would slow and eventually end, and the Straits lighthouses would shut off their beacons for the winter. Mr. Marshall closed the lighthouse station for the season 100 years ago on January 27, 1907, and it did not reopen until March 27 that spring, said Ms. Baker, who just finished deciphering the March logs.