Jacobsville Sandstone

The settlement beside the light takes its name from a quarry, and that quarry sent red stone from this shoreline into the facades of buildings across half a continent. It is the strongest architectural claim this stretch of coast has.

The stone

Jacobsville sandstone is a distinctive red to red-brown sandstone occurring along the southern shore of Lake Superior. Its most useful quarrying property was the thickness and homogeneity of its beds: the rock sits in massive, consistent layers, which meant very large blocks could be taken out sound and squared — exactly what a stone-faced commercial building needs, and something many otherwise attractive stones cannot deliver.

Its colour did the rest. The warm red carried a great deal of visual weight in the heavy masonry architecture fashionable in America in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and for roughly a generation it was genuinely in demand.

The quarries

Quarrying ran hardest from about 1883 to 1896, peaking in the early 1890s. Something in the order of thirty-two quarries operated over the life of the industry, clustered near Jacobsville and Marquette with others scattered along the Lake Superior coast.

The operation that matters most here is the Wolf & Jacobs quarry — also known as the Portage Entry quarry — which opened in 1883 a short distance north of the light station and worked until 1898, producing more than two and a half million cubic feet of stone. The settlement that grew around that operation is the Jacobsville the light is named for. The quarry came first; the place name followed.

Why it left by water

Dimension stone is heavy, bulky and low in value per ton, and moving it overland in the 1880s was ruinous. Moving it by lake was not. A quarry opened directly on a Lake Superior shoreline, beside the entrance to a through waterway, could load blocks onto vessels essentially at the quarry face and deliver them to any port on the Great Lakes system.

That is the whole economic logic of the industry, and it puts the light station in a different frame. The lighthouse was not marking an abstract shipping route: it was marking the entrance beside which one of the region's export industries was loading out. Duluth, Chicago and Buffalo served as the lake ports for inland distribution, and from there the stone travelled west to Kansas City, south to St Louis and New Orleans, and east to Cleveland, Philadelphia and New York.

Where the stone went

Locally it is everywhere — churches, public buildings, commercial blocks, breweries and houses through Marquette and the Houghton–Hancock district, where the red facades are a defining regional characteristic rather than an occasional flourish.

Beyond the region it was used between roughly 1880 and 1920 in hundreds of prominent buildings across eastern North America, including the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, itself demolished at the end of the 1920s. Its significance has since been recognised internationally, and it has been designated a global heritage stone resource — a formal category for stones of documented importance in the built environment.

Why the trade ended

Two forces closed it. The first was fashion: heavy masonry gave way to steel framing, terracotta, and lighter cladding, and the demand for large dimension stone simply evaporated.

The second was technical, and it is a caution for anyone conserving these buildings. The sandstone's cementing material varies from bed to bed, and some of it is calcium carbonate, which is soluble in water. Blocks with a significant calcite cement can weaken under prolonged exposure to moisture — a slow, cumulative failure that made the stone less attractive as its performance record accumulated. The last active quarry, run by the Portage Entry Redstone Company, closed between 1923 and 1926.

The same climate, the same problem

It is worth noticing that the mechanism which undermined the stone trade is a close relative of the one that destroyed the station's first tower. Water in masonry, repeatedly frozen and thawed on a cold, wet, exposed shore, degrades the fabric from the inside. The 1869 rebuilding answered it with mass, taper and better bedding; the stone industry could not answer it at all. See the 1869 rebuilding.

The quarry history and stone characteristics summarised here follow the Keweenaw Geoheritage material published by Michigan Technological University, whose broader work on the district's geology is at mtu.edu. The industrial landscape it belongs to is interpreted by Keweenaw National Historical Park.