Au Sable Light Station: Cultural Landscape Report, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, National Park Service

Quinn Evans Architects; Land and Community Associates; Weekley, Rachel

The Au Sable Light Station, located within the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, is a relatively intact nineteenth-century lighthouse station on the south shore of Lake Superior. The station lies in an area considered treacherous for navigation and sometimes called the “graveyard coast” because of the frequency of shipwrecks in the area. Following repeated calls for navigational aids along this stretch of shoreline, the United States Light-House Board approved the construction of a light tower on Au Sable Point in 1872; the station became known as “Big Sable”. The station grew through the years, with major construction and site development occurring during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Currently the property includes ten extant buildings and structures: a light tower and attached passageway, two dwellings, a boathouse, a fog signal building, two privies, a brick oil house, a metal oil house and a garage. The site also includes significant landscape features and characteristics. The most important character-defining qualities and features of the landscape- the edge definition of the Lake Superior shoreline and bluff; a densely vegetated forest edge; the verticality and visual prominence of the light tower; the site arrangement of two distinct but interrelated clusters, the lighthouse/residential cluster and the waterfront/industrial cluster; and the internal sidewalk system- are still present today. The goal of this project is to produce a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) for Au Sable Light Station that provides preservation treatment recommendations and preliminary design plans for phased implementation of the treatment recommendations. The scope of work for the CLR also includes documentation of the physical history of the site, a graphic site chronology, analysis of the history of the site over time, documentation of existing conditions, and an integrity assessment of the site. This study provides an overview of the evolution of the Au Sable Light Station. Particular attention focused on the addition, maintenance, and removal of cultural resources from 1872 to 1997. This site history is based in large part on the 1994 historical data section developed by Rachel Franklin Weekley for use in a CLR for the Au Sable Light Station. With the intention of building on-rather than duplicating-previous efforts, NPS provided Land and Community Associates (LCA) with the Franklin Weekley report on disk. That document, which provided the basis for the site history, has been revised and supplemented to meet the current scope of work and to be consistent with current findings and additional research.

Au Sable Light Station: Cultural Landscape Report, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, National Park Service

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