History
The island’s lighthouse connection began in 1873 when the Lighthouse Service moved the district's depot from Mare Island to the southeast side of Yerba Buena Island. In 1875 construction was completed on the 25 foot tower with a fifth order Fresnel lens. In 1886 another fifth order lens replaced the previous one. In 1933, a tunnel was bored through Yerba Buena Island to serve as a link between the east and west sections of the Oakland Bay Bridge. The light was automated by the United States Coast Guard in 1958. It is currently an active aid to navigation and not open to the public. Now that the lighthouse is automated, the former keeper’s quarters are now the home of the Coast Guard District Commander.
Read more about this topic: Yerba Buena Light
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)