Beloved Lion's Head lighthouse to be rebuilt soon

Lion’s Head’s little red and white lighthouse has a tradition of blowing down, moved around and being put right back up.

With overwhelming community support, construction is to start soon to rebuild Lion’s Head lighthouse after storms and high water in Georgian Bay battered it last fall then destroyed the 1980s replica of the 1913 original in January.

More people have offered to help than will be needed, said Ryan Deska, Northern Bruce Peninsula’s community services manager. And the community raised more than $10,000 despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic’s restrictions on gathering.

“It’s a profoundly important community landmark and it’s something that the community is rebuilding,” Deska said.

“I always knew it was an important landmark for the town and for the area,” said Northern Bruce Peninsula Mayor Milt McIver. “So I knew there would be a lot of support to rebuild … .

“People are not only suggesting they want to see it rebuilt but they’re willing to donate money to the project. And so it’s very much a community project.”

With community volunteers, including local contractor Doug Hill and retired high school teacher Brian Swanton, whose students built the 1980s replica lighthouse, the resulting lighthouse will be stronger and more durable, Deska said.

It will be clad in a white-painted, stamped cement product which looks like the painted cedar shakes of the original lighthouse. It will be structurally more robust on the inside, and will be moved back six to nine metres from the last lighthouse location.

The location will be the same as where the original, 28-foot-tall lighthouse was moved to in 1919 and the new lighthouse is almost exactly the same size, Deska said.

Drawing of the soon-to-be-built Lion’s Head lighthouse, replacing one destroyed by wind and waves in January. (Supplied)

The original lighthouse location was at the end of the dock but the fearsome and historic Great Lakes storm of 1913 blew it across the harbour, said Swanton, the retired teacher, in an interview Thursday. He has looked into the lighthouse’s story.

That structure was found by a local resident, recovered, restored and ultimately placed at the end of the dock by the Coast Guard in 1915, then was moved farther back on the dock – a sturdy timber-framed and stone-filled structure — in 1919.

That original lighthouse endured fire in 1933, was repaired and brought back into use, then about the next year it was placed atop a cement deck installed on the dock.

The Coast Guard took down the lighthouse in 1969, replaced it with a simple navigation light, and no lighthouse stood until Swanton’s students identified restoration of the lighthouse as a class project and built it in the early 1980s.

The lighthouse was moved in 2000 to the end of the dock again, when the Coast Guard put its navigation light back on the lighthouse, where it sat until waves and wind made short work of it last fall and winter.

The new lighthouse will be set on a slightly different axis, have a metal entrance door, a window rather than a wooden cut-out above it, and solar panels to power the Coast Guard’s navigation light.

Swanton said first the concrete base must be poured, possibly starting next week, and in likely a couple of weeks, construction of sections of the lighthouse will be prefabricated in Hill’s shop by volunteers, then brought to the harbour-side site for assembly.

A proposal to create seating on the pier could follow construction of the lighthouse, which it’s hoped would be completed sometime in July, Deska said.

There had been a proposal to clad the new lighthouse in stone but an engineer raised a concern that it might be too heavy for that site, which has seen some erosion, Deska hass said.

But it’s deemed a suitable site for the lighthouse as proposed and all approvals required for construction are in hand, Deska said.

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