About This Reference
What this site is, where its facts come from, and what it deliberately does not do.
What this is
This is an independent, non-commercial reference on the Portage River light station at Jacobsville, Michigan — its architecture, its optical apparatus, its keepers, and the waterway it was built to serve. It is written for people interested in Great Lakes maritime heritage and nineteenth-century infrastructure architecture.
What this is not
- It is not the light station's own website, and it is not connected to, endorsed by, or authorised by anyone who owns or has owned the property.
- It is not a visitor guide. The station is a private residence and its grounds are closed to public access. Nothing here is an invitation to visit.
- It is not a lodging site. There is nothing to book, reserve or enquire about.
- It sells nothing. There is no shop, no order form and no donation appeal on this site.
- It is not a navigational resource. Nothing here should be used on the water.
Please respect private property
People do sometimes go looking for lighthouses they have read about. This one is somebody's home, the grounds are closed, and there is no public access of any kind. If this page has made the building interesting, the right way to act on that is to read further — not to drive out to it.
Sources
Dates, dimensions and personnel on this site are drawn from published compilations of United States Lighthouse Board records. The two most directly relevant to this station are:
- Lighthousefriends — a station-by-station history compiled largely from Lighthouse Board annual reports.
- Terry Pepper's Seeing the Light — a long-running reference on Great Lakes lights, which the station's own former website linked to for its history.
Wider context comes from the National Park Service maritime heritage programme, the United States Lighthouse Society, Keweenaw National Historical Park, and, for the sandstone, the Keweenaw Geoheritage material published by Michigan Technological University.
Two dates that do not agree
Readers comparing sources will find a conflict worth knowing about. Material formerly published at this address gave a timeline in which Congress approved the light in 1853 and the station was deactivated in 1919. The Lighthouse Board record gives 1855 for the commencement of work and 1 August 1920 for the discontinuation.
This site follows the documentary record and uses 1855 and 1920, while noting the discrepancy rather than quietly resolving it. Neither version is unreasonable — approval, appropriation, commencement and completion are four different dates, and popular timelines routinely collapse them — but a reference should say which one it is using and why.
Illustrations
All images on this site are interpretive illustrations produced for it. They are not photographs, archival images or measured surveys, and they should not be cited as a record of the station's actual appearance at any date. They are captioned as illustrations throughout.
Corrections
This reference tries to distinguish clearly between what is documented, what is inferred, and what is illustrative. Where it states a fact it names a source; where it reasons from the architecture it says so.