Farallon Island Light Station

Farallon Island Light. Photo from the late 19th or early 20th century.

The Farallon Island Light Station is a lighthouse facility in California that went into operation in 1855 . It is located on Southeast Farallon Island , the largest of the Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Francisco .

In the second half of the 19th century the system scene of clashes between egg collectors who was Pacific Egg Company (later Farallones Egg Company ), the lighthouse keepers , and adventurers, all by selling eggs of nesting on the Farallon Islands guillemots in San Francisco made money.

The lantern room of the lighthouse was removed as part of the automation of the facility in 1972; the original Fresnel lens was transferred to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in the 1960s . As a navigation sign , the facility on the rocky volcanic island, operated today by the United States Coast Guard , is still important.

history

Background: Confrontation with the Pacific Egg Company

By the mid-19th century, more than 400,000 guillemots were breeding on the Farallon Islands. Here is a recording from 2005.

The lighthouse on the island of Southeast Farallon was one of the first eight lighthouses built in California . The United States Lighthouse Board , founded in 1852, commissioned entrepreneurs Francis A. Gibbons and Francis S. Kelly from Baltimore , who had already gained experience building lighthouses on the east coast of the United States, to build these facilities . When the workers hired by Gibbons and Kelly for the construction anchored on the schooner Oriole off Southeast Farallon at the beginning of 1853 , they met employees of the Pacific Egg Company (later: Farallones Egg Company ), a company founded in San Francisco in 1851 who claimed the right to sole use of the island.

In those early years of the California gold rush , food was extremely scarce, and the Pacific Egg Company made huge sums of money collecting guillemot eggs in the Farallon Islands, which they then sold to prospectors in San Francisco to replace hen's eggs. At the beginning of the breeding season, the company sent ten to fifteen 'egg collectors' to the islands, who then removed the guillemots' nests in the rocky cliffs for the duration of the breeding season. In the first few years of its existence, the Pacific Egg Company had tried several times to obtain the official right to use the volcanic islands exclusively, but its submissions repeatedly failed. In order to avoid a conflict with the government, the foreman of the company therefore agreed with the construction workers from Gibbons and Kelly in the spring of 1853 that they could start building the lighthouse.

The construction of the lighthouse facility

South Farallon Light House. Cal: . Photograph by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge , who photographed a number of California lighthouses between 1871 and 1872.

It soon turned out that the original construction plans could not be implemented due to the geographical conditions. The contract concluded by Gibbons and Kelly provided for the construction of a one-and-a-half-story residential building for the lighthouse keeper, in the middle of which the actual lighthouse should rise. Since there was not enough space on the island for such a construction, Gibbons and Kelly decided to only build the lighthouse on the highest point of Southeast Farallon and to build the lighthouse keeper's house at the foot of the mountain.

The construction work proved extremely difficult. Since there was no suitable dock for ships on Southeast Farallon , all building materials had to be loaded onto boats and then hoisted onto the island with the help of a loading boom. Then the workers, laden with four to five bricks, climbed the steep cliffs to the very top of the mountain, constantly running the risk of falling through a misstep. Despite these adversities, both the residential and lighthouse buildings were completed in November 1853 and everything was ready for the installation of the first-order Fresnel lens ordered in France .

When it finally arrived on the island in December 1854, it turned out that the lighthouse was too narrow and the lens could not be installed as intended. The construction plans of the lighthouse had been drawn up at a time when a different, less voluminous optic was still being used and apparently no one had thought of adapting the plans to the new Fresnel lens. For this reason, the tower had to be torn down again and rebuilt in a wider version. In December 1855, the second construction was finally completed and the Farallon Light Station could be put into operation for the first time.

The eggs wars ( Egg Wars )

To egg pickers . This drawing by Ernest C. Peixotto shows an egg collector on the Farallon Islands who is carrying the results of his collecting activities.

Even after 1855 and the end of the gold rush, one could still earn a lot with egg collecting. That is why the first lighthouse keepers from Farallon Island Light Station participated in the lucrative business. Amos Clift, one of the facility's first lighthouse keepers, wrote in a letter to his brother:

“The egg season is the month of May and June and the profit is […] quiete an item […] if I could have the privilege of this egg business for one season, it is all I would ask [and] the government might then kiss my foot. "	"The egg season is May and June and the earnings are [...] considerable [...] if I had the privilege of running the egg business for just one season, that would be all I need [and] the government could do me." like. "

Clift's career as a lighthouse keeper ended when the Lighthouse Board removed him from office for attempting to monopolize the egg business. The conflicts between the - comparatively low-paid - lighthouse keepers, the Lighthouse Board , the egg collectors of the Egg Company , as well as adventurers attracted by profit did not end with this impeachment. They culminated in two armed clashes in 1863 and 1881, which went down in the history of Farallon Island Light Station as the " Egg Wars " .

The first incident occurred in the spring of 1863 when the Lighthouse Board notified the government that a group of armed adventurers had built and walled a stone house on Southeast Farallon and were ready to defend the property by force of arms. Although a group led by Captain Charles Scammon was initially able to evict the gunmen without the use of force, they returned in June 1863 and engaged in an exchange of fire with employees of the Egg Company , in which one of the employees was killed. A number of the attackers were subsequently arrested and charged with murder.

The second incident took place in 1881. The employees of the Egg Company had begun sea lions to Tran to process, after which the lighthouse keepers complained about the smell of rotting corpses, claiming that the smoke produced impair the function of the lighthouse. When some of the egg collectors finally attacked a lighthouse keeper, the Lighthouse Board sent a US Marshal and 21 soldiers to the island in May 1881 and had all Egg Company employees removed from the island. This end of the Egg Company finally meant that - despite the ban - the way was now free for the lighthouse keepers to secretly pursue egg collecting as an additional source of income. However, until the beginning of the 20th century, the market price for guillemot eggs continued to decline and in 1909 the Farallon Islands were declared a bird sanctuary.

The foghorns from Farallon Island Light Station

The fog, which is common on the California coast, posed an additional threat to ships in the area of ​​the Pacific off San Francisco. For this reason Hartman Bache , an engineer in the United States Army and inspector of the twelfth Lighthouse District in the 1850s , left a special one Install foghorn on Southeast Farallon . He had the whistle of a steam locomotive installed on a hole naturally formed in the rock by the waves . Every time the waves pushed the air up in the hole, the air pressure created in this way started the extraordinary foghorn . However, the construction had its pitfalls: even on a clear day, the fog horn sounded incessantly when the sea was stormy, while it would fail in fog and calm seas. After a storm destroyed this first foghorn, it was eventually replaced by a steam-powered system housed in a special foghorn building.

From the takeover by the US Coast Guard until today

The current condition of the facility. On the top of the mountain, the tower can be seen without the lantern room removed in 1972. At the foot of the mountain you can see houses, rainwater collecting basins and cisterns. Photo from 2007.

In 1939, the management and operation of the California lighthouses were transferred to the United States Coast Guard . Like many other facilities, the Farallon Island Light Station went into unmanned operation in the second half of the 20th century. The first order Fresnel lens was dismantled in the 1960s and replaced by a modern beacon . It is now located in the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park and can be viewed by visitors there. In 1972, as part of the automation of the facility, the lantern room of the lighthouse was also removed.

Today the Farallon Island Light Station is located in the Farallon National Wildlife and Wilderness Refuge , a protected area established in 1969. Visitors are prohibited from entering Southeast Farallon ; however, boat tours for tourists to the islands are offered from San Francisco between June and November. The former lighthouse buildings are now used as accommodation for researchers.

literature

• Peter White: The Farralones . In: The Keeper's Log , Fall 1988, pp. 2-13. Online (PDF; 1.9 MB, English)

Web links

Commons : Farallon Islands Light Station  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Farallon Island Light - via Inventory of Historic Light Stations, California Lighthouses, on the US National Park Service website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter White: The Farralones , in: The Keeper's Log, Fall 1988, p. 3.
2. ↑ See Randy Leffingwell / Pamela Welty, Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast. Your Guide to the Lighthouses of California, Oregon and Washington , Minneapolis, MN 2000, pp. 31 and 35.
3. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , p. 4.
4. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , pp. 4f.
5. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , pp. 4f.
6. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , p. 5.
7. ↑ Both White, The Farralones , p. 5 and Sharlene Nelson / Ted Nelson, Umbrella Guide to California Lighthouses , Seattle, WA 1993, p. 94 state December 1855 as the date of commissioning. Bruce Roberts / Ray Jones, Lighthouses of California. A Guidebook and Keepsake , Guilford, CT 2005, p. 49 give January 1, 1855 as the date of commissioning. Bruce Roberts / Ray Jones, California Lighthouses. Point St. George to the Gulf of Santa Catalina , Quebec 1997, p. 31 and Jim Gibbs, Lighthouses of the Pacific , Atglen, PA 1986, p. 78 again indicate January 1, 1856 as the date of commissioning. The above text follows the information provided by White and Nelson / Nelson, which is also published on the websites of the US Coast Guard ( Historic Light Station Information & Photography: California , last accessed on April 29, 2013) and the US National Park Service ( Farallon Island Light , last accessed on April 29, 2013).
8. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , p. 6.
9. ↑ Quoted here from White, The Farralones , p. 6.
10. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , pp. 7f.
11. ↑ On this and the following cf. White, The Farralones , p. 8.
12. ↑ On Bache cf. Ray Jones, The Lighthouse Encyclopedia. The Definitive Reference , Guilford, CT 2004, pp. 62f.
13. ↑ For more details, see White, The Farralones , pp. 9f.
14. ↑ Cf. on this and the following Elinor DeWire, The DeWire Guide to Lighthouses of the Pacific Coast. California, Oregon and Washington , Aracta, CA 2010, p. 36.

Coordinates: 37 ° 41 ′ 56.9 ″  N , 123 ° 0 ′ 6.6 ″  W.