Given keepers’ low salaries and heavy responsibilities, “it appears that being unwell was a luxury in itself,” Surface-Evans wrote. Other finds included bottles for castor oil and milk of magnesia. For example, there were fragments of bottles of medications for stomach and digestive problems and nose drops excavated at 40 Mile Point. The three sites provide insights into how keepers and their families lived, including their use of medicines. “We can learn so much more by studying the artifacts they leave behind.” Official documents like keepers’ daily logs provide only basic information about such mundane matters as weather, passing ships and maintenance, she said. The artifacts left behind can help correct that “misinterpreted perspective,” she said. That included elderly parents and unwed sisters. The reality is lighthouse keepers typically were married and had family or extended family living with them there,” she said. The mythology is that lighthouse keeping was a “lonely pursuit and a male realm. She said the most surprising finds at the sites were domestic objects relating to families and family life. She wrote, “How did their health affect their daily lives and mental well-being? How did social trends in medicine influence their own perceptions of well-being?” Surface-Evans’ own chronic illness motivated her to use archaeological evidence such as the remains of medicinal objects, food and personal items, as well as documents, to discover how people living and working in lighthouses managed their health. Clair County now maintains Fort Gratiot, the first Great Lakes light station.Įach Great Lakes lighthouse “represents a broad swatch of maritime and lighthouse history from the 1820s to the 1940s,” when the last of them were automated, Surface-Evans said in an interview. McGulpin Point was decommissioned in 1906 and sold in 2009 to Emmet County for restoration and reopened to the public. Clair River and Lake Huron in Port Huron.Ĥ0 Mile Point, automated in 1944 and transferred to Presque Isle County in 1984, is now a museum. Her research focused on three Michigan sites: McGulpin Point Lighthouse, 40 Mile Point Lighthouse on Lake Huron between Alpena and Cheboygan in Rogers City and Fort Gratiot Lighthouse at the junction of the St. She began exploring the archaeology of Great Lakes lighthouses in 2011 as a Central Michigan University faculty member. “While lighthouses housed people, they were primarily built as workspaces and not necessarily designed with the comfort of living in mind,” she wrote. The work “required round-the-clock attention and a military-like routine,” as well as an assumption the keepers were physically fit, according to Surface-Evans. Their arduous duties included climbing the many steps to tend the light, assisting ships in trouble, carrying heavy loads and shoveling coal. Physical evidence unearthed at the site in Mackinaw City included bones from butchered pigs, spent ammunition, dolls and doll-sized dishware, canning jar fragments, marbles and “multiple pepper sauce bottles, which could have been used to store ketchup, vinegar or relish.”ĭavenport, who staffed the lighthouse three miles from the nearest town for 27 years, “was very focused on maintaining the well-being of his children through access to both food and play,” Surface-Evans wrote.ĭavenport’s experience reflects how tough life was for lighthouse keepers in remote locations around the Great Lakes. “The challenge of caring for his remaining eight children probably weighed heavily on Davenport,” senior archaeologist Sarah Surface-Evans of the State Historic Preservation Office wrote in a recently published study of the well-being of keepers and their families at three Great Lakes lighthouses.ĭavenport used his “paltry annual salary” to buy toys for the five girls and three boys, gardened, maintained an orchard, raised pigs and hunted to feed the family. Seven years later, his son drowned when falling through the ice in the Straits of Mackinac. LANSING - The wife and newborn daughter of longtime McGulpin Point Lighthouse keeper James Davenport died during childbirth in 1891.
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