History
The original lighthouse on the location was constructed in 1889 when the second breakwater for the harbor was built. This light stood until 1934 when the present lighthouse was constructed. In 1936 an attached one story keeper's quarters was added.
On December 4, 1942, a boat used to transfer keepers of the light capsized during a change of keepers. Six coast guardsmen died in this incident. The station remained manned until 1968 when it was automated.
The original fourth order Fresnel lens was removed to the H. Lee White Maritime Museum in Oswego in 1995. In December 2000 the lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
It is the only lighthouse of four in Oswego still standing. The light is currently solar powered.
Read more about this topic: Oswego Harbor West Pierhead Light
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)