With the switch to Daylight Saving Time and longer days, a whiff of spring is in the air as temperatures gently rise and then fall. It means Waukegan Harbor soon will be welcoming big lake ships into its docks.
Historically, March begins the Great Lakes shipping season where commodities like cement, wheat, lumber, coal, iron ore and other products are transported by commercial boats across the inland seas to and from deep-water ports. Waukegan Harbor is ice-free while icebreaking operations begin this week in other locations, such as Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Officially, the complete navigation season begins when the Soo Locks in Sault St. Marie, Michigan, are slated to open on March 25. More than 4,500 vessels, carrying up to 80 million tons of cargo, annually maneuver through the Soo Locks and into the five big lakes. The port of Duluth on Lake Superior moves the most tonnage to the Great Lakes.
It’s an exciting sight to see the commercial lake freighters motor into the Waukegan Harbor pier along Seahorse Drive and unload their cement cargoes during the shipping season. While many think of the city’s lakefront as reserved for sport fishing and pleasure boats, Waukegan Harbor is a multifaceted Lake Michigan maritime port, supporting its own robust economy and employing hundreds.
Historians say French Jesuit missionary Pere Marquette, who with Louis Jolliet first mapped the northern Mississippi Valley, including some of the Great Lakes, visited the Waukegan lakeshore in 1673. He saw the vicinity of what became the trading post of Little Fort as a safe harbor.
For any shipping hub to flourish in the early days of Great Lakes maritime trade, lighthouses were needed to warn mariners of shoals, and welcome boats to critical harbors which still dot the lakes. Perhaps not as viable as the ports were in the late 19th and 20th centuries, these big-boat commercial harbors remain with us.
Waukegan’s first lighthouse, made of brick, was constructed at the harbor in 1849. It cost an estimated $4,000, according to the historical group, Lighthouse Friends. Truman Hibbard was hired in 1849 to serve as the city’s first lighthouse keeper.
In 1852, Congress appropriated $15,000 for Waukegan Harbor improvements that included a breakwater with an elevated catwalk parallel to the shore to protect the harbor, in addition to navigation aids. Over the years, renovations and improvements were continued, including a fog horn and razing of the original brick beacon.
In 1909, a lighthouse keeper’s residence, which still stands at the corner of Madison Street and Harbor Place, was constructed. It has been repurposed into small shops.
John Williams, who lost an arm in the Battle of Gettysburg, was appointed keeper of the city lighthouse in 1865, serving in that capacity until his death in February of 1892. The Army Corps of Engineers completed a renovation of the lighthouse pier in 2019.
The current green pierhead lighthouse is at the end of the North Pier at South Marina, the remainder of the fog signal building and lantern room of the lighthouse, which were destroyed in a fire in June of 1967. On a balmy day, walkers can be seen heading past the Waukegan Port District’s South Marina to the beacon.
The U.S. has the most lighthouses in the world. They exist not only along the shorelines of the Great Lakes, which at one time had an estimated 300 lighthouses, but on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and along the Gulf Coast.
The first Great Lakes lighthouse was erected at Fort Niagara, New York, along the Lake Ontario shoreline. Our neighbor to the north, Wisconsin, has a slew of lighthouses along the Lake Superior shore, around Green Bay and the Door County peninsula, and on the Lake Michigan shoreline down to Kenosha.
Waukegan’s beacon wasn’t the only one guiding sailors during the height of lake commerce. The Point Clinton brick lighthouse, near Walker Avenue and Oak Street in the Town of Fort Sheridan, was built in 1856.
The Port Clinton Lighthouse was sold in August of 1873 at a public auction. It was destroyed in 1900.
The northern Cook County suburb of Glencoe also hosted a lighthouse, Taylorsport, located off Sheridan Road near Harbor Street, according to Lighthouse Friends. It was built in 1856, sold at auction in 1873 for $1,700 and destroyed around 1900.
Evanston, too, had its Grosse Point Lighthouse, which was located in what is now Millburn Park near Lighthouse Beach off Sheridan Road by Northwestern University. Pere Marquette reportedly used the area as an overnight stop during his journeys.
Chicago Harbor still has two operational lighthouses, both off Navy Pier. The city’s remaining water intake cribs — Four Mile, 68th Street, Carter H. Harrison, Edward F. Dunne, Wilson Avenue and William E. Dever — also were fitted with electrical navigation devices to aid mariners. The final crew of light keepers was withdrawn from duty on them in 1990.
When spring officially begins on March 20, Waukegan Harbor begins to come alive once again as shore fishers hit the breakwaters and boaters begin readying their crafts for a summer of fun on the water. As they do, the city’s lighthouse remains a welcoming beacon.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
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