Historically Famous Lighthouses

The table of contents groups lighthouses by place, among them Alaska, with Cape Sarichef Lighthouse and Cape Spencer Lighthouse, and California, with Farallon Lighthouse, among others. Two primary lighthouses are said to mark Unimak Pass, the principal passage through the Aleutian Islands into the Bering Sea. Cape Sarichef, originally built in 1904, is described as the only manned lighthouse on the shores of the Bering Sea.

At Minots Ledge, the two assistant keepers kept the bell ringing and the lamps burning, and just before midnight on the 16th cast a bottle adrift containing a message for the outside world in case they failed to survive. The great Minots Ledge Lighthouse is said to have slid over toward the sea just before 1 a.m. on April 17, 1851. In 1856 Congress appropriated $35,000 for “rebuilding the Cape Charles Lighthouse upon a proper site and fitting it with proper illuminating apparatus.” The text says a new tower was completely destroyed by “a party of guerrillas” in the Civil War then raging before it was finished.