Half-acre rock has stories
By DAN SCHNEIDER, DMG WriterGULL ROCK - Peter Annin says the maritime history that transpired at Gull Rock is a compelling reason to save one of the most remote lighthouses on the Great Lakes.
Annin is the executive director of the Gull Rock Lightkeepers, a nonprofit group working to restore the lighthouse, which was built in 1867.
Annin related some of the stories related to the Gull Rock Lighthouse Tuesday as he drove his 4Runner on the rough road out to High Rock Bay.
He said it is emblematic of the dangerous conditions on the rock that the original foreman in charge of building the lighthouse died during construction.
James Corgan, one of a series of "very colorful keepers" of the Gull Rock lighthouse - "some who only stayed for about a year because they couldn't handle the isolation" - came to Gull Rock after being demoted from his post as keeper of the Manitou Island Lighthouse. Later, in September of 1883, Corgan reassumed charge of the lighthouse on the opposite end of Manitou Island when the man who had been his replacement, Reuben Hart, was lost in the waves of Lake Superior. Hart's sailboat capsized in a storm within sight of shore. Hart's two assistants, one of whom refused to row into the storm, watched from shore as Hart drifted out into the waves.
In 1913, the year the U.S. Coast Guard transformed the Gull Rock Lighthouse into an unmanned, automated light, a potential tragedy ended with everybody alive. Nov. 8 of that year, Annin said, the ore freighter Waldo, its steering mechanisms crippled and its rear pilothouse blown into Lake Superior in a storm, slammed onto the rocks. The ship's hull cracked in half but the pieces stayed together.
No one was in the lighthouse to offer assistance. No one had manned the place since it became automated five months earlier.
Annin said it took three days for rescue boats to reach the site. One rescue crew set out from Eagle Harbor in the station's backup boat, their larger rescue boat being dismantled and under repair. They returned when the smaller boat couldn't handle the waves. The larger boat was reassembled and the rescuers sped toward Gull Rock. Annin said that boat arrived at the rock at nearly the same time as a rescue boat dispatched from the station on the Portage Waterway.
Everyone was alive on board the Waldo.
"Gull Rock is home to the Edmund Fitzgerald with a happy ending," Annin said. "They got all 26 people and two dogs off of there."
The Waldo was iced over solid with rain and snow and spray. Annin said the crew stayed alive by burning anything wood they could find on the ship - chairs, tables, paneling - in a makeshift fireplace fashioned from a bathtub. The chimney was a stack of buckets with the bottoms kicked out.
Dan Schneider can be reached at dschneider@mininggazette.com
