The Smith Island Lighthouse was located at the far eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, approximately five-and-a-half miles west of Whidbey Island. It became operational in 1858 and served the island for just shy of a century. It was the scene of a minor but well-publicized skirmish between an assistant lightkeeper and indigenous Haida tribal members when the station was less than a year old, and it sheltered survivors of a noteworthy shipwreck on the island in 1901. But from the beginning, the lighthouse was doomed. It was built 200 feet from a bluff that gradually eroded over time, and it was abandoned in 1957 when the encroaching cliff began to threaten the structure. Pieces of the building began to fall over the edge in 1969, but it was a slow affair that continued for nearly 30 years. The last pieces fell in 1998.
Beginnings
The waterways were the highways of the Pacific Northwest as European settlers began to travel more extensively throughout the area in the mid-nineteenth century. Running aground was a constant threat for ships passing through, and in 1856 the United States Lighthouse Establishment (later the U.S. Lighthouse Service) began building the first lighthouses along Washington's coast and on some island locations. They served a dual purpose: to provide a navigational aid for shipping, and to act as a lookout post against roving indigenous tribes from the north, primarily from the Haida Gwaii islands in British Columbia.
The roughly 15-acre Smith Island (first named Blunt's Island but known as Smith Island for most of its history) is strategically located on the eastern edge of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between five and six miles west of Whidbey Island and a dozen or so miles north of the entrance to Puget Sound at Admiralty Inlet. Its lighthouse was the fifth built in Washington, and it became operational on October 18, 1858. It was engineered by Hartman Bache (1798-1872), a U.S. military engineer who was involved in the construction of a number of early lighthouses on the West Coast.
The building was a Cape Cod-style structure that operated both as a keeper's quarters and a lighthouse. It measured 25 by 35 feet, was two stories tall, and its masonry walls were more than 14 inches thick. The tower projected through the roof of the building's north side and had a metal lantern room on top, and the lighthouse's apex was 97 feet above the water, 45 feet above the ground. It originally operated with a fixed fourth-order light, which was replaced with a Fresnel lens in 1885. A blockhouse was built to safely house the island's residents in the event of a Native attack, and it later served as an oil storage house. Over the ensuing years more structures were built on the island, including a fog signal building and two additional houses for the assistant lighthouse keepers and their families.
Warriors from Haida Gwaii episodically attacked other tribes and the growing white settlements in the area, keeping its inhabitants on constant alert, and it wasn't long until the lighthouse saw its first action. In May 1859, residents from Port Townsend intercepted a Haida canoe carrying an elderly Indian chief, a disabled chief who was missing a hand, and 24 women and children. Fearing an attack was imminent, they jailed the Natives. The settlers soon realized their mistake and released the Haidas, but the damage had been done. The Natives left, but a few days later Haida war canoes were spotted off Smith Island. The head keeper, John Vail, and his wife Jane evacuated, but Assistant Keeper J. R. Applegate remained. A group of Haida later landed on the island and shot at Applegate while he was in the lighthouse tending the light. He returned fire and wounded one of the attackers, driving them away. The episode was hyped by the settlers more than it probably deserved, leading some wags to dub it the "Battle of Smith Island" (Lighthouses of the Pacific, p. 162).
Lightkeepers
Applegate left later in 1859 and the Vails the following year, and a succession of keepers followed, some remembered, others forgotten. Among those remembered are keepers from the Dennison family. DeWitt Dennison (1830-1891) became assistant keeper in 1880, replacing another assistant keeper, John Wellington, who drowned in a boating accident on the island. Dennison moved his wife and six children to the island, and the following year he became head keeper. He was in the position for 10 years, serving during a more peaceful time in which the indigenous tribes no longer represented the threat that they had 20 years earlier. By the 1880s Natives were traversing the waters to travel to the mainland east and south of Seattle to pick hops and make a little money, and it was common for them to camp on the island. Dennison died in 1891 and his son Frank became keeper, serving briefly as assistant before being promoted to head keeper. The rest of the family left soon after DeWitt Dennison's death, but Frank remained on the island until 1905, and started his own family while he was there.
An especially renowned lightkeeper was Bernard Meagher (1860?-1935), who served as head keeper between 1915 and 1925; his wife Harriet (1877-1967) was assistant keeper for at least six of those years. On September 2, 1917, Meagher was at his post when a passing steamer, the Samson, became disabled by a broken steam pipe and began drifting toward the island. He left his post, rowed the steamer's first mate to the nearest telephone 11 miles away on the mainland, then rowed back to the island to make sure the station's light was on by dark. The feat brought him considerable recognition, including a letter of commendation from the U.S. Lighthouse Service the next year. But this was not his only adventure. In 1920 he rescued three people from a burning boat and took them to the mainland, and in 1922 he provided food and shelter for five crewmembers of a seaplane that was forced down near the island by a storm. His career ended on a sad note when he was felled by stroke in March 1925. He never fully recovered and died in Seattle 10 years later.
Harriet Meagher initially remained on duty at the lighthouse after her husband's stroke. Even in her brief time as acting head keeper, she had her own adventure. On the morning of April 1, less than a month after she took over, she saw a small boat land on the beach. She watched the craft for some time, but no one disembarked. Concerned, she went to the beach to investigate. She found two unconscious people on board who had been asphyxiated and were in serious condition. Fortunately, there were also several men working on the island that day, and with their help she was able to successfully revive the victims.
Smith Island is connected by a narrow, thousand-foot-long thread of land stretching east-northeast to little Minor Island, but the connecting strip is only visible at low tide. It was such a threat to early shippers that on June 30, 1904, the first kerosene lamp was lit at the tip of Minor Island. A small beacon was later built, and if its light went out the lightkeeper who happened to be on duty at Smith Island was tasked with relighting it. It was such an occurrence that led to the death of another of the island's lightkeepers, Edwin Clements (1891-1939), on a stormy night in late 1939. The assistant keeper who normally would have handled the task was new to the job and not fully versed in dealing with the threats he faced from the storm. He also was a young man, with a wife and two small children, whereas Clements was nearing 50. Because of these factors, Clements volunteered for the task. His boat was found flipped over on the beach the next day, and his body was found the day after.
The Wreck of the Minnie A. Caine
The island has had its share of shipwrecks, due in part to its shoals and extensive kelp beds which can also snag a boat. Frequent fog compounds the problem. Though wrecks have been recorded at the island as far back as 1862, the most notable came 40 years later and involved the four-masted wooden schooner Minnie A. Caine. The 200-foot-long lumber transport, launched just a year earlier at Seattle's Moran Brothers Shipyard, encountered a severe storm on Christmas Night 1901 while under tow by the steamer Magic through the eastern part of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The seas became so rough that the tow rope either broke or was deliberately cut to prevent the smaller steamer from swamping. The Caine attempted to sail through the gale but eventually lost all four of her sails and was thrown ashore on the northwestern shore of Smith Island. The crew was rescued and remained on the island into the new year.
The cost to salvage and repair the ship was initially believed to exceed its original $55,000 price, and the vessel was significantly underinsured. There was some talk of abandoning the schooner, but further inspections showed repairs to be feasible. However, the recovery operation turned out to be a bigger story than the wreck was. Forty workers began work in January 1902 to raise the ship from the sand and place it onto a makeshift trestle, where a tugboat would then be used to push it into deeper water. It was a slow, deliberate operation, and three separate times storms shoved the ship back onto shore, undoing the work of weeks. A subsequent period of particularly low tides forced work to pause for another few weeks. Then workers realized the tugboat they had been using wasn't up to the job. With the aid of a more powerful tug, the Tyee, the Caine was pushed more than 85 feet off the shore and finally freed in early May.
Island "Wildlife"
Before the lighthouse was built, there was no wildlife on the island other than seabirds. Save for some small patches of bushes and a few trees, the island itself is mostly grassland. This didn't stop various lightkeepers from bringing animals onto Smith Island, with decidedly mixed results. In the early 1900s keeper Joe Dunson brought a bull to the station, but the 1,100-pound beast escaped from its enclosure and for the next five years terrorized the island's residents. Efforts to capture it were unsuccessful, as were efforts to shoot it. Finally, in the summer of 1911, two hunters landed on the island, determined to finish the animal off. One shot the bull in the head four times with a .44 caliber Winchester rifle, but the bullets failed to penetrate its inch-thick hide. The frustrated shootist raced to the beach, borrowed a .30-30 rifle from a fisherman, returned to the fray and with two shots successfully dispatched the beast.
Efforts by various lightkeepers during the early twentieth century to raise sheep on Smith Island seem to have been more successful, but another failed experiment came with rabbits. Joe Dunson's son Ray had a fondness for rabbit meat, and he decided to raise rabbits on the island. They quickly multiplied and became a nuisance. There were several attempts to rid the isle of the bunnies by both the Coast Guard (the successor to the U.S. Lighthouse Service) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but these were not successful, as explained in one account: "The minute the [Wildlife Service] fellows pulled away in a boat, all you could see were pairs of ears sticking out of holes" (Washington Lighthouses, p. 90). The rabbits are still there.
Eroding Away
When the lighthouse was built in 1858, it stood about 200 feet from a 50-foot bluff on the western edge of the island. Whether the builders were not aware that the bluff was eroding or whether they did not consider it a threat that it would reach the lighthouse is not known. However, within two decades the erosion had been noted and was causing increasing worry. An 1878 account says, "The sea is rapidly eroding the west face of the island, and the bank is continually caving. It is at present only about 160 feet distant from the dwelling, and if as much damage is annually done as has been done in each of the past few years, the sea will, unless an extensive breakwater is constructed, reach the light in about ten years" ("Smith Island Lighthouse").
No breakwater was built, but the prediction that the lighthouse might be destroyed within a decade was far too pessimistic. It instead was manned for nearly a century while the bank slowly slid away, averaging roughly 20 feet a decade. By 1949, the structure was about 40 feet away from the bluff. Yet the lighthouse remained an important navigation marker, and the Coast Guard was reluctant to abandon it. But the bluff continued to inexorably erode, and in April 1957 the building was abandoned. The Coast Guard built a skeleton steel tower near the center of the island and installed a flashing light on top of it. They maintained a presence on the island for another 20 years, until an automated light was installed in 1977.
By 1960, only 10 feet separated the lighthouse from the brink. It was impractical to try to move the 300-ton structure, and the first pieces fell in 1969. The erosion continued in fits and starts through the 1970s and 1980s, but the building remained largely recognizable until the late 1980s. By then, less than a quarter of it was left. There it remained for almost a decade, a disappearing reminder of a disappearing past. Boaters enjoyed passing the island and looking to see if it was still there. The last piece toppled without witness in the spring of 1998, having survived nearly 140 years.
Smith Island Today
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, parts of the lighthouse were salvaged before its collapse. A 1963 Seattle Times article tells how Jim Gibbs, a longtime lighthouse buff and author of the book Lighthouses of the Pacific, acquired the four-ton lantern room from the building and transported it to the Skunk Bay Lighthouse a mile west of Hansville (Kitsap County), where it remains today. The Fresnel lens was similarly salvaged by the Puget Sound Historical Maritime Society and is presently at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.
Both Smith and Minor islands were designated as part of the state's aquatic reserve in 2010. Measuring 36,308 acres, the reserve is the largest in Washington, and it contains the state's largest bull kelp bed. (Bull kelp is a plant which can grow up to 40 feet in one season and provides food and shelter for marine and beach-dwelling creatures.) Smith Island is also home to the largest, and one of the last, puffin colonies in the Salish Sea. The tower's light at Smith Island remains operational, though the Minor Island light was discontinued in 2015. A few ancillary structures on Smith Island survive but have fallen into disuse. Access to Smith and Minor islands is prohibited by the Department of Natural Resources and visitors are required to stay 200 yards from shore; aside from the birds and rabbits, there is little activity on the island today.
