❖ RICHARDSON to SMITH ISLAND ❖ with June Burn, 1930

Richardson store and oil dock, 1958.
Lopez Island, San Juan Archipelago.
Original photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

"Off to Smith Island with Capt. John Thompson of the little boat JEAN G. Down the slender strips of gravel between rail fences, the island lying trim and narrow north and south, the sea and its islands falling away to the east and west.
      Down into the cup of the island past Hummel Lake, glittering in the sun, the sun on grass, on plowed fields.
      The tide is out so that when we reach the dock at Richardson we must climb down spikes driven into a piling and so onto the deck of the Jean G.
      The captain takes aboard supplies for the radio and lighthouse tenders on Smith Island. In a few minutes, we are chugging southward towards the isolated dot lying off Whidbey Island, Island County.
      On our starboard bow Woody Island (called Buck Island on my map) with its 'Chateau' built to hug and straddle and fit the snags of a big gray rock. As we leave the scant protection of Woody and Long Islands to go rolling and plunging into the great swells of Fuca the captain lashes down his tender, his freight and whatever is loose on deck. There is a wind from the southwest to augment the swells so that we do considerable rolling and wallowing, now on top of the long hummock of a wave, now in the cradle between two such peripatetic ridges. The Captain stands on his short, stocky, seaworthy legs apparently unconscious of the roll. But I can't stand up at all.
      Halfway to the island, the eclipse of the sun darkens the world, but we have no smoked gasses through which to see the shadow of the moon swing leisurely athwart that golden prow.
      As we approach Smith the captain points out Minor Island that at very low tide is a mere spit but between which and Smith the JEAN G. can go at extreme high tide. Thus casually does land become island or peninsula and I used to think an island was fixed geographic identity!
      Capt Thompson makes four trips a month to this small fifty-acre island stop which a great light guides wayfaring ships. He brings the mail, supplies of food, instruments sent out by the government to the lone exiles who tend the light and the radio and the compass.

SMITH ISLAND
Light was first shown at this station 18 October 1858
This is a few years after June Burn's visit on the JEAN G.
USCG Photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

As we come around the spit to the dock on the south side of Smith, we see the whole population of eight or ten persons waiting on the beach. For the mail. The captain takes the mail in the first boatload of us and eager hands grab it. One man empties the box, scatters the letters on the ground and in the lee of the boathouse everyone stirs the pile to find his own. In a half a minute or less every man and woman is holding an open letter in his hand, reading. Other letters wait between the fingers for their turn.
      Mail every eight days! It isn't so long to wait if one is frantic with hurry and work. But if one is living in such comparative solitude with so few contacts and such exacting tasks, eight days is an eternity.
      We climbed the always immaculate circular stairs to the light in its dome. From there all of Puget Sound in a magnificent scape of land and sea. Mt. Rainier and the Olympics to the south. The Cascades, Baker, and blue foothills eastward. The Canadian Coast range across the rim of the north and the hills and mountains of Vancouver on the west. I thought if I strained my eyes around that slow bend of Juan de Fuca that I might see the ocean itself but I couldn't. What a spot in which to work! What grandeur in every direction! For all its solitude, its loneliness I think I'd like keeping the light on Smith Island.
      We went into the compass room where an operator is on duty day and night. A ship in a fog can send out a request to be located and the compass man will place him with nice exactness. No big boat equipped with radio need ever pile up on rocks. If the pilot is in doubt he can get his exact position. Of course, the trouble is that the pilot isn't in doubt and so he doesn't bother asking for a position and thus occasionally finds himself piled up of a gray foggy morning on a bleak craggy rock.
      Everything on Smith Island is trim and neat. The whole island looks like a big private lawn with a little cluster of willows in the middle. The winds shriek there and the very grass is put to it to hold its roots. But what a place to live! Let's go into lighthouse service! Thank you, Captain John, for a memorable experience. See you tomorrow, June."
Above text from Puget Soundings. Burn, June. 1930

(Sorry, no photo of the Jean G. on file.)
There is a post on Saltwater People Log about the salvage and removal of the Smith Island Light by Leiter Hockett working for historian Jim Gibbs HERE
      If you'd like to read more about the history of this lightstation, Historian Lucile McDonald wrote an article published in Puget Sound Maritime's Sea Chest journal of September 1981. It has been posted on this Log HERE

❖ HISTORIC SMITH ISLAND LIGHT ❖

Smith Island Lighthouse
Photo by Bernie McNeil
Published by Smith-Western, Tacoma, WA.
Card from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

"Automation has robbed Washington's island lighthouses of the aura of adventure that was once associated with living at these isolated stations. The Smith Island light has been extremely familiar to boaters and seamen passing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is the third oldest lighthouse site in the entire Puget Sound area. Only Tatoosh and Dungeness preceded it.
      Because Smith Is is composed of sand and clay instead of hard rock, its story is different from the others; today's light is not the original one erected in 1858. An aid to navigation was essential at this location, where Rosario Strait meets Juan de Fuca, but the currents had a tendency to erode the bluff on which the tower must stand. Looking into the future, the builders carefully constructed it 200 ft from the edge and believed that the structure would be safe. 
      The old tower was built of white-washed brick and the lower portion was wide enough to accommodate the keeper's living quarters. At first, a lone man was assigned to the post and he brought his family along. Thus Mr. and Mrs. John Vail and their grandchild were the initial inhabitants of the island.
      In that day wandering Indians from [Haida Gwaii] were a menace to remote outposts near the water and it was considered advisable to provide a fort in which the lightkeeper might take refuge. Accordingly, a blockhouse and a barn were built close by the tower. If the lighthouse had been provided with metal doors and window shutters instead of wooden ones this protection would have have been needed. 
      The tower went up through the center of the house and the top of the revolving lantern was painted red. The light was first shown on 18 October 1858.
      For six months the Vails, who had been joined by Mr. Applegate, an assistant keeper, enjoyed a placid existence. The housewife amused herself gathering marine curiosities and observing the bird colonies. So many sea pigeons nested on the island that whites and Indians came there to hunt the birds with hooked sticks, dragging them out of the holes in which they burrowed.
      Then one day in May 1859, five large canoe-loads of Haida Indians pulled ashore,

❖ BOOZE RUNNER ON THE ROCKS ❖

The U. S. S. GUARD Makes Large Liquor Seizure

Six Thousand Dollars Work of Canadian Liquor and Opium 

 in Hands of Federal Authorities.

The US Revenue Cutter GUARD

Jane Barfoot Hodde noted "the GUARD 

was slow and couldn't catch many rumrunners".

While cruising about Smith Island Tuesday afternoon, Captain Greene of the U.S.S. GUARD, picked up a booze runner, whose craft, the speed boat K 247, had been driven ashore on Miner's Ledge of Smith Island, during the southwest blow Sunday.

      The boat's cargo consisting of 49 cases of choice Canadian booze valued at $5,000, besides several thousand dollars worth of opium according to the owner, was being taken to Seattle for the Christmas trade. The owner of the contraband goods and boat gave his name as Giles Martin of Seattle. He was accompanied by an assistant whose name was not learned. The speed boat is a total wreck.

      The men were completely worn out by their shipwreck experience and made no effort to destroy the convicting evidence when approached by Capt. Greene. They, with the contraband were brought to Friday Harbor; late Tuesday afternoon they were taken to Seattle where the booze runners will be turned over to the federal authorities for prosecution.

       This is one of the largest and the first booze seizure by the Coast Guard since last February, and Capt. Greene is to be congratulated upon his good fortune."

Text only from: The Friday Harbor Journal
Front Page, 30 November 1922

      A few years previous to this incident, Gus Viking of Friday Harbor, served as a crew member on the cutter GUARD, as noted in the FHJ of Feb. 1916.

❖ RELOCATION OF THE SMITH ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE LANTERN ❖ by Captain Leiter & Ruth Hockett

Story takes place July 1959.
Essay from author to web admin in 1997.
Published in Water Work, Hockett, L. W. (Trafford) 2005.

Smith Island Light Station, June 1949.

In 1858 the station was 200-ft from the cliff edge.

In 1949 sand & clay banks had crept to within 40-ft.

The two buildings at left center are the keeper's homes.

Further left are the power house & control buildings,

water tower, and wartime barracks.

Photograph by the US Coast Guard.

Original in the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society.©

"Smith Island is at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The lighthouse stone work, materials, cast-iron lantern- house, lens, and auxiliary equipment were shipped from the east coast around Cape Horn. The structure was built in 1857; the lamp lit 18 October 1858.
      After a century of wasting waves at the confluence of currents, a recorded Haida attack, and numerous earthquakes, the Coast Guard replaced the lighthouse with an unmanned airway-type light on a steel tower set farther east. The solid stone block house was about thirty-feet from the edge of the bluff at the time.
      Jim Gibbs, former editor of the Marine Digest and former Coast Guard lighthouse keeper had acquired the lighthouse and asked me to remove the lantern from the tower, set it up on his property on the bluff above Skunk Bay, several miles northwest of Point No Point.
      While raising the F.V. MIDWAY, in June 1959 near Partridge Bank, I had the tug AMAK take me to Smith Island to check it out. On 4 July 1959, we left Ballard with my 88-foot crane barge, the MV- 41. Jim Gibbs was aboard with Bob Butts and Ralph Mote.
      Arriving at the island we anchored in four-fathoms near the bight on the south side of the Island. That night a southeast blow caused us to weigh anchor and shift into deeper water; we returned inshore in the morning to work.
      Jim went ashore to look over the tower and lantern with me; he did not want the floor plate or railings. I radioed Bob Monroe to send a float plane for Jim. When the plane arrived in the afternoon he wished us well and departed.
      The brick light tower was approximately forty-feet high. On top was the ten-sided lantern housing from which the window glass, lens, and auxiliary equipment had been removed. It was made of cast iron segments bolted at their bottom to a circular cast iron floor, eight-feet in diameter and 1.8-inches thick. Inside, a square hatch opening was cast at the side of the floor with a hinged cover at the top of the spiral iron stairway.
       The lower part was made of solid panels with ventilators in the center of every other one. On the outside of the panel, at the ventilator openings, was an integrally cast box open on the bottom. Inside was a radial disk damper that could be adjusted from open to closed to accommodate the original oil lamp. On top of each intersection of the panels was a mullion that supported the conical top and framed the window glass. The top was made of ten triangular shaped castings that, when bolted together, formed a conical roof of approximately half-pitch that was fitted with a finial ventilator.
       Around the outside of the lantern was a brick walkway with eight forged-iron railing stanchions, equally spaced and mortared in. They supported three one-inch round iron railing rods that penetrated the stanchions. These rods were joined by tubes slipped over the ends and riveted. We had rigged an "A"-frame to hang over the side with a block and a manila line to lower the lantern parts. They had been assembled with 5/8-inch bolts, with pump rod threads and cast iron square-nuts on each end. Disassembling the structure was as easy as if it had been installed the previous month.
      Having lowered the thirty-one components of the lantern we cut the railing rods, dug the stanchions out of the brickwork, and threw them down. We dug the floor casting loose from the brickwork, pried it up, blocked it, then tied a line on a toggle through the hatch hole and prevailed upon the Coast Guard to yank it off of the tower with their Jeep.
      The back porch was of three granite steps, 7.5" x 11.5" x 48". The Coast Guard obligingly transported the pieces to the water's edge where we loaded them with my crane at high tide in about one-fathom of water and right in the kelp.
      Loaded, we moved to the ferry dock at Kingston. Arriving on 7 July 1959 at 0530, we off-loaded onto my crane truck then delivered the load to Jim's site above Skunk Bay. There we assembled the lantern of the floor plate on the ground.
      The granite back porch and steps were sandblasted of what appeared to be a yearly coat of hard, coast-guard-gray paint and are now on the patio in our back yard forming a solid and child-proof table.
      The lantern has been installed on a wood frame small scale lighthouse. It is named Skunk Bay Memorial Lighthouse, privately maintained, and showing a continuous, low-power, red light in the USCG Light List. The lens is part of the collection at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. The house and tower are rubble at the bottom of the bluff on the west side of Smith Island".

Business card from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society.

Below Text:
James A. Gibbs
West Coast Lighthouses
Superior Pub., 1974

SKUNK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE
Official since 1965.
Original photo from the archives of the S.P.H.S.©

"Skunk Bay Lighthouse is the only official privately-owned lighthouse on Puget Sound. It is a navigational aid by accident. It was an oversight one night that caused the writer [Gibbs] to leave the light blinking in his 'retreat' lighthouse on the shores of Skunk Bay off Admiralty Inlet.
      The structure was built in 1959 and fitted with the lamphouse from the abandoned Smith Island Lighthouse. But the idea of it being a permanent light was only a lark. When the flashing lighting apparatus was accidentally left on one night calls poured into the Coast Guard headquarters from confused navigators and from air pilots at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. Fearing nefarious schemes to lure vessels astray, high ranking officers appeared next day to reprimand the culprit. After inspecting the structure, they labeled it as good a lighthouse as any in the district, and gave strict orders to either keep it lit or to keep it off. The former course was followed, it became official in the Light List, and a red light has been displayed every night since from a lamphouse that dates back to 1858.
      The unit was sold to the Skunk Bay Lighthouse Association in 1971, a group of several owners."

The autobiography of Seattle's Captain Hockett's sixty years of boatbuilding, commercial hart hat diving, marine surveying and related endeavors.
This book is out of print.
Book search here