page_title: History of lighthouses in Canada
section_title: Colonel Anderson's Tenure, 1900-14
hierarchical_section_title: History of lighthouses in Canada / Colonel Anderson's Tenure, 1900-14
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the construction of the Pointe-au-Père lighthouse in 1909 Français&#160;: Photo de la construction du phare de Pointe-au-Père en 1909
context_page_description: The history of lighthouses in Canada dates back to 1734.
context_section_description: In the 1870s responsibility for navigational aids was transferred from the Department of Public Works to the Department of Marine and Fisheries. In 1904 the Department's Lighthouse Board was given a broader mission, and its dynamic chairman Colonel William P. Anderson planned an ambitious construction program. Various coastal beacons were upgraded from reflector-type to state-of-the-art Fresnel lenses, manufactured by Barbier, Bénard & Turenne of Paris (fr:BBT), or Chance Brothers of Birmingham (UK). In order to lessen the dependence on such foreign suppliers, the Dominion Lighthouse Depot was established in a former starch factory at Prescott, Ontario in 1903. Numerous old wooden towers were replaced by reinforced concrete or prefabricated cast-iron towers, examples being Metis, Cap de la Madeleine, Cap Chat and Matane on the Gaspe peninsula, Cape Croker on Georgian Bay, and Cape Race in Newfoundland. The latter was perhaps the most important landfall beacon for North Atlantic traffic, and remains one of a handful of lighthouses in the world equipped with a giant hyperradiant Fresnel lens. It also boasted a new diaphone or compressed-air fog horn, a 1902 invention of Toronto's J.P. Northery Ltd. Click to download an audio clip (WAV format) of the diaphone foghorn in Duluth MN, or of the electric foghorn (RealAudio format) at Race Rocks, BC.
  In 1904, the pre-fabricated cast-iron lighthouse at Fame Point, near Anse-a-Valleau on the Gaspe coast, became the first maritime wireless (Marconi) station in North America. In 1977, this lighthouse was dismantled and became a tourist attraction in Quebec City, but it was returned to its original site in 1997 and the whole light station, known today as Pointe-à-la-Renommée, has been restored.
  To support the higher-order lenses (which floated in a bath of mercury), exposed ferro-concrete towers were sometimes buttressed, such as at Point Atkinson  in Lighthouse Park near Vancouver BC, Natashquan Point in Quebec, Ile Parisienne in Lake Superior, or at Langara and Sheringham Point on Vancouver Island. In 1910 one of these towers was built at the windswept summit of Triangle Island, 25 miles (40 km) off the northern tip of Vancouver Island. However, this turned out to be a costly blunder; at an elevation of 650 feet (200 m), the light was far too high to be visible in bad weather. After 10 years, the lantern was dismantled and brought back to the Coast Guard base in Victoria while the original plan of building a lighthouse at Cape Scott was carried out in 1927.
  The art of building tall lighthouses using reinforced concrete reached its ultimate expression in the flying buttresses of Estevan Point on the Pacific Coast, at Michipicoten Island and remote Caribou Island in Lake Superior, at Northeast Belle Isle in the Strait of Belle Isle, at Bagot Bluff on Anticosti Island, and at Pointe-au-Pere near Rimouski, Quebec. At 109 feet (33 m) the latter ranks with Point Amour Lighthouse as Canada's second-tallest lighthouse.
  Some lighthouses from the early 1900s were of traditional 8-sided timber construction, such as at Point Riche near Port au Choix, Newfoundland, Henry Island in Cape Breton (NS), at La Martre, Quebec (site of a museum) on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Lonely Island in Lake Huron, or at Pachena Point on Vancouver Island, site of the terrible 1906 shipwreck of the SS Valencia. However, the vast majority of post-1910 lighthouses replicated the octagonal pattern using the new ferro-concrete construction technique. Examples are Peggy's Cove and Western Island (NS), Cap Gaspe File:Forillon National Park of Canada 4.jpg and Cap au Saumon (PQ), and Machias Seal Island (NB). This style was carried to impressive height (102 feet) at Cape Sable Island (NS), Long Point in Lake Erie, and Great Duck Island in Lake Huron.
  The ornate Point Abino Light Tower near Fort Erie, Ontario dates from 1917. It was built as a memorial to the crew of the Buffalo-based US Lightship #82 which went down with all hands during the infamous Great Lakes Storm of 1913, which claimed a total of twelve ships and 235
caption: Construction of Pointe-au-Père lighthouse
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