History of lighthouses in Canada
Another early lighthouse in the Maritime provinces, at Cape Roseway[2] dates from 1788 when Shelburne was booming as the largest settlement of United Empire Loyalists on the continent.
[3] It was decommissioned in 1907, but remains as the oldest existing lighthouse on the Great Lakes, since the one built in 1804 at the mouth of the Niagara River was demolished to make room for Fort Mississauga during the War of 1812.
In that same year, False Duck was demolished and its lantern eventually became the centrepiece of Mariner's Memorial Lighthouse Park and Museum[4] near Milford, Ontario.
One of their first projects was to have Edward Cannon erect a circular build a lighthouse on Ile Verte at the treacherous junction of the Saguenay and Saint Lawrence rivers.
An important beacon was built in 1830 on desolate Seal Island, Nova Scotia, 18 miles (29 km) offshore and at the gateway to the Bay of Fundy.
The timbers of its 67-foot (20 m) octagonal tower have proven to be amazingly durable, although the 1903-vintage lantern and its 1st-order Fresnel lens were replaced (and moved to a replica lighthouse museum in Barrington Passage) in 1979.
In fact the eight-sided wooden pattern was used in many subsequent Canadian lighthouses, notably by John Cunningham, in 1845 at wave-washed Gannet Rocks in the Bay of Fundy.
[12] The tower was designed by the firm Alexander S. Gordon using the same prefabricated cast-iron approach as Gibbs Hill Lighthouse and other outposts of the British Empire.
Then in 1980, after a local outcry had kept the Seal Island lantern from being taken away, the historic lighthouse at the northern tip of Cape Breton was instead targeted for relocation to Ottawa.
In 1884, public clamour following the 1867 Queen of Swansea tragedy led to a cast-iron lighthouse being erected at the summit of Gull Island, off Newfoundland's Bay de Verde peninsula.
Lobbying by the Admiralty and by Canadian shipping magnates such as Montreal's Hugh Allan resulted in an ambitious three-year building program, where all material and construction costs would be borne by Great Britain.
[18] The Point Clark tower was formally registered as one of the National Historic Sites of Canada, the only lighthouse on the Great Lakes or Georgian Bay to receive this highest-level designation.
[24] Unfortunately, there is a long list of wooden lighthouses which burned down, including the second one at Cape Ray in Newfoundland, the one on Ile Haute in the Bay of Fundy, Holland Rock in BC, and the one on remote Greenly Island, south of Labrador.
In 1904 the department's Lighthouse Board was given a broader mission, and its dynamic chairman Colonel William P. Anderson planned an ambitious construction program.
Various coastal beacons were upgraded from reflector-type to state-of-the-art Fresnel lenses, manufactured by Barbier, Benard, et Turenne (BBT) of Paris, or Chance Brothers of Birmingham (UK).
The latter was perhaps the most important landfall beacon for North Atlantic traffic, and remains one of a handful of lighthouses in the world equipped with a giant hyperradiant Fresnel lens.
In 1904, the pre-fabricated cast-iron lighthouse at Fame Point, near Anse-a-Valleau on the Gaspe coast, became the first maritime wireless (Marconi) station in North America.
In 1977, this lighthouse was dismantled and became a tourist attraction in Quebec City, but it was returned to its original site in 1997 and the whole light station, known today as Pointe-à-la-Renommée, has been restored.
After 10 years, the lantern was dismantled and brought back to the Coast Guard base in Victoria while the original plan of building a lighthouse at Cape Scott was carried out in 1927.
It was built as a memorial to the crew of the Buffalo-based US Lightship #82 which went down with all hands during the infamous Great Lakes Storm of 1913, which claimed a total of twelve ships and 235 lives.
